


Muscles Better and Nerves More

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Blow Jobs, Body Horror, Bodyswap, Fake/Pretend Relationship, First Time, Getting Together, Hand Jobs, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Rituals, Sexy Shame, Slow Burn, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 13:28:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15819822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: “I’m serious,” Ryan says. “Don’t go fucking up my body. I want that shit back in the same condition I left it.”“The same condition—Ryan. I’m not spending hours in a gym every day so you don’t lose muscle mass.”“I want you to treat my body with the respect you would a national park. Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories.”***A certain meddling Voodoo Queen of New Orleans thinks Ryan and Shane need some new perspective on life. After an inadvisable ritual deposits Ryan in Shane’s body, and Shane in Ryan’s, the ghoulboys pursue some soul-searching and self-discovery to put things right.  Sometimes in a sexy way.





	Muscles Better and Nerves More

**Author's Note:**

> _i like my body when it is with your_  
>  body. It is so quite a new thing.  
> Muscles better and nerves more.  
> \--Excerpt from “i like my body when it is with your” by e.e. cummings 
> 
> I've played fast and loose with some voodoo lore and ritual for purposes of plot, but mean no disrespect!

*****

**Ryan _._**

It’s Shane’s idea to go back to New Orleans.

He says it’s because the fans loved the voodoo ep the first time around, and because Bloody Mary is a treasure who they should welcome back to the Unsolved extended cinematic universe. Both of these things are true, but Ryan suspects the real reason is that Shane wants to get his party on.

“You just want more beads,” Ryan tells him, and then he laughs when Shane puts on a dreamy, faraway look.

“I’ll never be satisfied. Give me those beads.”

“You don’t have enough boob to really earn them.”

“I don’t care. I need ‘em, Ryan!”

But in the end Shane doesn’t have to twist his arm, really. There are plenty of voodoo-related locations to explore, Bloody Mary is a fan favorite and a true character, and he wouldn’t mind another round of Sazerac himself.

When Ryan reaches out to Mary to find out if she thinks there’s potential to film another Unsolved episode, she cackles at him. He thinks he’ll always remember her knowing laugh, hoarse from cigarettes smoked and a life well-lived.

“Honey, you could film ten seasons of your show and never leave this city. I’ll take you to visit the voodoo queen herself.”

“I thought you were the voodoo queen?”

“I’m the latest in a long line. I mean the OG, Marie Laveau herself. They might not let us film inside the cemetery, but her home on St. Ann Street is still standing and I happen to know the owner. Bring your tall friend back down here and we’ll see what the spirits give us.”

*

They roll into New Orleans early one morning in mid-October, tired and rumpled and grouchy as hell. Ryan can tell it’s going to be a rough day even before the plane’s wheels come down, when Shane threatens to throw the bag containing the spirit box out of the emergency exit hatch.

“Right into the Gulf of Mexico, Ryan. It sleeps with the fishes, not that the fishes have done anything to deserve that.”

“We got some really compelling spirit box evidence last time we were here, I’m not gonna _not use it_. Also if you did that the cabin would depressurize and we would all die.”

“It would be a noble death,” Shane says darkly, picking a little at the back of the seat in front of him where the plastic’s peeling around the headrest. “The people would understand. I’d be given a hero’s funeral.”

“Tell that to TJ’s wife,” Ryan says. “If you leave that baby without a father she’s going to hunt your ghost down and, and _re-murder_ it.”

Shane considers this.

“We can push Teej out with a parachute and one of those little rafts, and then he can float to safety and tell tales of my brave sacrifice. He can be my bard.”

“Nerd.”

The captain comes on over the intercom to let them know they’re beginning their descent into New Orleans, and Ryan settles back in his seat, glowering. The spirit box isn’t that bad, and he wishes Shane would stop being such a pill about it. Shane used to laugh about it, and now he just sighs and makes snide remarks to Mark behind the camera when he thinks Ryan can’t hear him.

The landing is bumpy and uncomfortable, and they wait forever at baggage claim, and when they get outside the air is sticky with humidity. They’ve taken about three steps in the direction of the car rental office when the sky opens and dumps rain on them, the perfect symbolism for everyone’s foul moods.

They spend the whole ride to the hotel picking at each other and dripping on the seats while the crew studiously ignores them. Shane’s gone monosyllabic, sitting with his body angled away from Ryan’s like he might need to jump out of the moving van at any moment. Ryan’s on edge the way he always gets when Shane’s annoyed, trying to restore the mood with jokes, overcompensating and then getting snappish in return when they don’t take.

A feedback loop of mutual frustration.

It’s been like this more and more lately, is the thing. The little annoyances that happen when you spend this much time together, traveling together and eating together and sleeping in the same room—they build up. Ryan’s worried that Shane might be reaching the end of his tether with the whole ghost-hunting thing, or maybe even with _him_.

He knows he can be a little high-maintenance, as humans go: nervous, a control freak, noisy.  Shane’s a low-maintenance kind of guy. Sometimes Ryan wonders whether they were only ever meant to fit together for a little while; if the show has blurred the line between play-bickering and real bickering in a way that will bring it all crashing down around their heads.

By the time they pull up to Bloody Mary’s home, Shane’s mouth is a tight line and Ryan’s nearly frantic with the effort of trying to not be annoying, which he suspects is making him _more_ annoying.

Bloody Mary takes one look at them and she can tell they’re both in pissy moods, and that Ryan’s anxious about it. She puts a reassuring hand on Ryan’s arm as she offers them seats in her living room. It’s like disappointing his mom, somehow, and he has to look away from her.

“You’re different than you were when I saw you last,” she observes while Mark and TJ go about setting up their shots and lighting. Ryan had forgotten how keen-eyed she is, for someone who seems so vague. “You’re not as happy as I remember.”

“I’m not unhappy,” Shane says, and Ryan can tell that he’s on the defensive even though his voice is calm by the way he leans back in his chair and crosses a leg over his knee. “It’s all a lot.”

“The show’s different now than it used to be,” Ryan tells her, not sure whether she’s ever seen the show, even her own episode. “Bigger, more people working on it, more pressure. It’s not as easy.”

She raises her painted-on eyebrows, looking at them back and forth.

“I mean this,” she says, pointing between them. “This is different, yes? More, but stretched thinner.”

Ryan hasn’t the slightest idea what that means, and from the nonplussed expression on Shane’s face he doesn’t either. She speaks like she operates on a slightly different plane than everybody else, and maybe she does. Shane will say she’s being deliberately vague, although he’d never disrespect her to her face.

“We’re still just us,” Ryan says. “We’re the ghoulboys.”

Bloody Mary makes a little noise of disbelief in her throat that makes Shane jump. “You need some perspective, is all. You need to see eye to eye again.”

She looks at Shane.

“You need to get out of your own head.”

She looks at Ryan, bringing her hand to her breast to tap at her heart.

“You need to get to know yourself a little better, without all the distractions. All of this is noise, hon.”

Ryan doesn’t know what to do with this series of incredible pronouncements. It’s like they’re her specimens and she’s pinned them to cardboard under a microscope for detailed observation. Ryan’s uncomfortable with the degree to which she’s able to look at them and decide, from their body language and a few words, what their major malfunctions are. And then just _say_ them out loud. Who does that?

“Hard to see eye to eye with shorty over here,” Shane jokes weakly. “Can we get him a box to stand on or something?” But Bloody Mary stares him down until he slides a little in his chair. Ryan should let it go, but he can’t.

“Or we could do everybody who has to look at you a favor and chop you off at the knee,” he says, and it’s meaner than he intended, but the irritation of the morning hasn’t worn away yet. Bloody Mary’s eyebrows go up. Shane bites his lip and makes that _face_ , somewhere between disappointed and mildly hurt, the one he makes when Ryan’s gone a little too far.

Bloody Mary sits forward in her chair, letting the sleeves of her caftan drape over the wingback arms dramatically. She really is a good show-woman, Ryan thinks. Even if voodoo’s not real, she’s great at making you think it might be.

“Will you let me help you?” she asks, and she’s asking them both but she’s looking at Shane, who needs the convincing more. “We could throw in an additional ritual—very easy, very painless. I think it would do you both a world of good.”

Shane purses his lips, and Ryan can feel him expending real effort not to roll his eyes or shift in his chair. Shane’s nothing if not a perfect houseguest.

“I’m in,” Ryan says, and Shane shoots him a quick exasperated look, eyebrows furrowed and nostrils flaring and then gone again as quickly as it came.

“Why not?” he says, finally. “I mean, if it’s _painless_.”

Mary rubs her hands together and stands up, ignoring the sarcasm. She’s scuttling around now, gathering things she needs for whatever she’s planning, and Devon has to corral her back into her chair and remind her they’re about to film.

Mary’s got a twinkle in her eye that Ryan’s not sure he likes one bit.

*

They go to film at the house on St. Ann Street. It’s a cute little building on a characteristically colorful street in the French Quarter that’s been subdivided into apartments, but Mary knows the landlord. She seems to know everyone in the city, because she’d also been able to get them into St. Louis Cemetery #1 to film in front of Marie Laveau’s mausoleum. 

Mary knocks before she enters.

“This place is sacred to those of us in the city who practice voodoo,” she tells them. “I’ve only been here for a few times, and only once for a ritual. You’re in for a real treat, boys.” 

She walks them again through the ritual of opening the gates to the spirit world and inviting them in, calling especially to Marie Laveau and her followers to join them in the small apartment. They do the usual business for a while, walking from room to room and talking about Marie’s life, about how she died in this very home in 1881. Ryan pulls out the spirit box, and Shane makes a face.

“It’s just kind of disrespectful here, isn’t it?  What does the most powerful voodoo queen in New Orleans’ history need with a spluttering radio? If she wants to talk to us, she’ll talk to us. She’s the Beyoncé of spirits.”

Ryan stares him down, channeling his very best Bloody Mary impression, and Shane puts his hands up.

“Fine. But if _Lemonade_ comes through that thing I’m leaving.”

Despite the history of the place, it doesn’t strike Ryan as very active. Laveau’s legacy is more about life and rebirth than death, after all, and Ryan can’t blame her if she’s got better things to do with her afterlife than talk to a couple of losers like them. Bloody Mary, her crazy stories, and her encyclopedic knowledge of New Orleans voodoo will make the ep, not the results of their ghost hunting. 

Finally, Mary calls them back to the living room, where she has them sit on the floor cross-legged.

“Last chance to back out,” she warns them. “You shouldn’t feel any pain or discomfort, but I can’t promise there won’t be any side effects.”

“What kind of side effects?” Ryan asks. He’d been on board before, but now he’s starting to have second thoughts. Voodoo doesn’t make him uncomfortable the way demons do, and this doesn’t feel dark to him. But he’s also keenly aware that he’s meddling with things he doesn’t really understand.

“I really couldn’t say,” Mary says, but her eyes slide to the side in a peculiar evasive maneuver. “Whatever the spirits think is necessary.”

Behind Mark and the camera, TJ gives them a thumbs-up.

Mary lights some candles in a circle around them. She knocks on the floor three times, and then she begins to chant, low and quiet.

“This is a _lave tet_ ,” she says to them, still quiet. “A baptism of the head, where your soul lives, to cleanse you of negativity. As you go through life your soul attracts dirt, like your body does. Sometimes you have to invite the spirits to clean it. A true _lave tet_ takes place over three days, so this is a modified version, but I think you’ll find it’s strong.”

Ryan meets Shane’s eyes in their circle of candles. The candlelight is dancing off him, making his face flicker eerily, and for the first time since they’ve been here Ryan is afraid. He wants to call it off, to stand up laughing and brush himself off and make for the exit, but then Shane’s gaze catches him and holds him.

He gives a little half-shrug, a gee-whiz gesture designed to make Ryan smile, and it does.

“Great, let’s blow some dust off the ol’ soul,” Shane says. “Mine’s filthy.”

“Like any baptism,” Mary continues as if she wasn’t interrupted, “you’ll come out of it new.”

She takes a small vial out of one of the many pockets of her caftan, uncorks it, and sprinkles a little water on Shane’s head. He shudders.

She upturns the bottle over Ryan’s head, and he flinches as the cold water hits his head and begins to trickle down his forehead and neck.

For a long moment, Mary mutters to herself and nothing happens. Then her chanting begins to get louder and louder. Behind Shane, over Mark’s left shoulder, Ryan can just make out Devon’s face, her eyes wide and startled. 

Mary’s almost yelling now, and then abruptly she cuts herself off by stamping her foot on the floor once, a magnificent robust _stomp_ that makes the house rattle on its bones. 

The candles flicker. It wouldn’t be strange if they’d flickered from the impact, but the _way_ they flicker is wrong, somehow. It’s as if they flicker in a wave, going around the circle, flowing and cresting around Ryan and Shane’s bodies.

“Now, if you would, gentlemen,” she says, addressing Ryan and Shane, “please look at your hands.”

Ryan obeys without thinking, glancing down at his hands in his lap—only to cry out with surprise and fear because, for the briefest of seconds, they’re not his hands at all. They’re big and long-fingered and knobbly-knuckled and _not his hands_.

He closes his eyes. Shane’s exclaimed something too, and Ryan can hear Devon asking if they’re okay, and Shane’s murmured reassurances in answer.

After a long breathless moment, Ryan forces himself to look back down at his lap. His hands are his own again, familiar and nail-bitten. He brings his hands up to his face to look at them better in the dim light, and they are as they’ve always been.

“Very good, thank you, spirits,” Mary says, apparently satisfied. She begins to blow out the candles and close the gateway, and Ryan chances another look over at Shane.

Shane is also examining his hands very closely, going over them as if looking for flaws. He keeps bending the fingers back toward his wrist and then clenching them into a fist, touching his fingers to his thumbs and rubbing like he’s making sure he can feel the touch.

Ryan has to fight back the urge to reach out and grab Shane’s hands in his, to look at them for himself.

Mary ushers them out of the house. As she does so, she says to Ryan, “If you have questions, feel free to call. I can’t tell you what to do, but I’m always available for friendly advice.”

Ryan can’t imagine a universe in which he calls this woman up for casual conversations.

Back in the van, on the way back to the hotel, Ryan chances it. Mark’s filming them from the middle seats, but that’s okay; if the footage looks anything like Ryan thinks it might, it’s going to require some reaction footage.

“That was weird,” he says for the camera, looking over at Shane. Shane’s still flexing his fingers and cracking the knuckles distractingly. Ryan fully expects him to pull the usual deny and evade bullshit.

“It was a little strange,” Shane agrees, and coming from him that’s practically an admission. He might as well have rented a plane to write out “GHOSTS ARE REAL” in sky-writing, that’s how surprised Ryan is.

“So after Bloody Mary stomped her feet all the candles flickered—”

“—that was probably just from the stomp, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. Anyway, she told us to look at our hands and for a second they were…it was like they were someone else’s hands. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s the only way to describe it. They were pale and way too big. And then when I looked back a second later they were normal again.”

Shane nods. “My hands also looked, like. Wrong. I wonder if her mentioning hands made us both imagine something weird happening to them, because that’s what we were expecting to happen. Is that—isn’t that a thing psychics do?”

“I don’t know. I feel normal now, though.” As he says it, Ryan runs through his body from head to toe, checking systematically for anything that’s not right. He doesn’t come up with anything amiss; he’s tired and hungry and a little hyper, the usual post-filming excitement buzzing in him, but none of that is unusual.

“Me too,” Shane agrees, holding his hand out to examine it in the light of the camera. Big and long-fingered and knobbly-knuckled. “Totally normal.”

*

Nothing happens for over a week.

Then they have a fight at work. It’s not even a bad fight, just a dumb disagreement, so minor Ryan wouldn’t have even given it a second thought except for what comes after. It’s a Friday afternoon and Ryan’s going over the footage from New Orleans, watching the part with their ritual over and over to see if he can catch anything amiss.

He’s frustrated because it’s too dark to see his hands or Shane’s, not well enough to see if they’re somehow different. The only thing they catch properly is the candles flickering, an unnatural motion of light like someone took a blanket and shook it out over the candles to push down a rolling wave of air.

He calls Shane into the VO booth to look at it.

“I dunno, Ryan. It happens right when she stops her foot. I think probably it rocked the floor and that made the candles flicker.”

Ryan tries to explain the wave effect, to make Shane see how there’s a flowing pattern to the flicker, but Shane just sighs.

“I’m sorry, I know you think this is big evidence, but I just don’t—I don’t see it. That’s how wave motion works, it’s an impact thing.”

“Fucking come on, man! Are you blind? It’s right in front of your face.” Ryan doesn’t understand why Shane won’t acknowledge this as proof that _something_ happened. All the hairs on the back of his neck stand up watching the footage.

He was in that room. He remembers the stunned look on Shane’s face, the way Shane had looked down at his fingers in the candlelight like they didn’t belong to him.

“I promise I’m not doing this to be a dick. It’s just not, it’s not enough for me.”

Ryan ends up slamming the headphones down on the table and stalking away, even though it’s not the most mature reaction. He’s starting to think he could capture an actual ghost on camera and Shane would find a way to explain it away. He knows Shane’s role in this is to play the skeptic, but he always assumed he had a chance to convince him with something real. If he doesn’t, what are they even doing here?

That night, he goes to bed annoyed. Not even angry, just irritated. The latest in a string of irritations that, over time, are starting to chafe.

He wakes up new, as Bloody Mary promised he would.

*

The first thing Ryan registers when he wakes up the next morning is that he’s not in his own bed, which is strange because he definitely fell asleep there.

He knows it before he even opens his eyes. The sun’s hitting him at the wrong place, falling on his eyes where usually it would be warming his feet where he’s kicked the blankets off. The mattress is too firm on his back, better than his own and newer.

His second clue is the cat perched on his chest in a little cat-loaf, purring right in his face. Ryan doesn’t _have_ a cat. Ryan is allergic to cats, and yet he isn’t sneezing.

Ryan squints his eyes open, struggling through the sun’s glare. His eyes are bleary, possibly from the sleep still caked there. He can make out the cat on his chest, though, and at first it’s a relief to recognize Shane’s cat Obi because it means he can cross _abducted by aliens_ off the list.

Then it’s abruptly much less of a relief, because he realizes: he’s woken up with Shane’s cat, in Shane’s bed, in Shane’s bedroom, in Shane’s apartment.  Ryan starts to panic, a breathless heart-clenching _what-the-fuck-did-I-do_ panic, before he realizes that even _that_ reaction is wrong.

Ryan had a few drinks the night before, it being Friday, but he wasn’t with Shane and he definitely went to sleep alone and in his own bed. He’s as sure of it as he’s ever been sure of anything in his life. Even the worst sort of earthly mistake, the very strangest explanation his brain can come up with for why he might be shirtless in Shane’s bed right now, doesn’t explain _this_.

One small mercy is that Shane’s not also in the bed, which spares them both an awkward conversation, and Ryan decides to get up and either go look for him or sneak out, depending on what mood overtakes him.

Ryan gently nudges Obi off his chest, swings his legs around to get out of the bed, and then heaves himself up to stand. He’s on his feet for one wobbly, perilous moment, and then his arms are flailing and he’s falling forward to his knees and then his face on the floor of Shane’s bedroom.

His balance is all wrong. His center of gravity is all wrong.

He lies there, sprawled out on the floor, weighing his options. Obi runs circles around him, making questioning chirp noises and rubbing his cheeks and jaw against the too-sharp points of Ryan’s elbows.

“Hey Shane, if you’re out there I could use a little help!” Ryan shouts. Then there’s a brand new mindfuck, the biggest yet. Because the voice that comes out of his mouth is _Shane’s_.

Ryan’s been trying to go a little easier on himself lately, so he gives himself the gift of just lying there on the floor for a while like a toppled-over giraffe. Maybe this is a dream and he’ll wake up. But after several shell-shocked minutes, or possibly a solid hour, he crams Shane’s glasses on his face, marveling when he can suddenly see fine, and crawls to the bathroom on hands and knees that aren’t his.

When Ryan reaches the bathroom he pulls himself up to the sink with arms that aren’t as strong as he’s used to, and puts all his weight against the vanity so he can stand. He looks at his face in the mirror, sees Shane’s sleep-bleary face looking back at him, and promptly falls over again.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he says, curled up on the bathroom floor, listening to Shane’s voice echo off the tile. “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.”

It takes him a solid half an hour to re-learn to walk; walking on Shane’s legs, in Shane’s body, is like walking on stilts. Shane’s got long legs, inches and inches more than Ryan’s used to, and he’s having trouble getting all that limb to behave. Finally he’s moving naturally enough that he thinks he can walk outside without being arrested for public intoxication.

He is a little bowlegged, though, like a cowboy in an old Western.

Then Ryan realizes he has to pee, and that’s another half an hour of panicking and deliberating while he decides whether he’s _allowed_ to pee or whether he will have to die of a kidney infection or an exploding bladder. Then he realizes that he’d actually be letting Shane die, sort of, so he sucks it up and pees while staring at the ceiling. He mutters a quick “sorry” when he shakes off and tucks his— _Shane’s_ , augh—dick back in his—no, _Shane’s_ —sweats.

Whatever’s happening to him right now is going to require extensive therapy to come back from, and Buzzfeed’s sure as shit gonna pay for it.

Distracted as he is by mastering basic bodily functions again, it takes a surprisingly long time for Ryan to get around to worrying about where his own body is, if it’s not here with him where it belongs—and also where Shane’s brain is, if not in Shane’s body. He has a hunch that he hopes is correct; if Shane’s currently running the controls in Ryan’s body it’s a terrible prospect, but preferable by far to the thought that it’s lying somewhere, abandoned and empty and rotting.

 _I’ve got to get home_ , Ryan thinks. _I’ve got to find myself. I’ve got to find Shane._

First he feeds the cat, because he may be freaking out but he’s not a monster.

*

Ryan gets behind the wheel of Shane’s car and it’s apparent that he presents an immediate danger to the public good, to himself, and to the physical shell of Shane. He doesn’t have any other options, though. He’s only got Shane’s phone, which is locked with a passcode he doesn’t know, so he can’t call a Lyft or his own phone.

It’s a disaster from the beginning. He’s used to sliding into cars with headroom to spare, but this time he thwacks the side of his head on the doorframe hard enough to make his eyes swim.

“Ow! Mother _fucker_!”

Ryan’s probably got a concussion or a brain bleed or something, but he pushes on. The problem is that his brain hasn’t figured out how to communicate with these new limbs yet; he tells Shane’s right foot to brake and has to consciously think _move your right foot_ to make it happen. It’s got his reaction times into unsafe territory.

His only solution is to pull an OJ Simpson and drive to his apartment doing ten miles per hour on surface streets the whole way, hunched over the steering wheel like a maniac while cars pile up honking behind him.

Shane’s car stereo blares some sad-sack duderock band’s CD the entire time and Ryan’s too nervous to blindly reach and turn it off. He thinks bitterly how very mad he will be if he dies in the world’s slowest car crash while Spoon plinks away in the background.

When Ryan gets to his apartment complex, he’s a lot more cautious getting out of the car than he was getting in. He’s never considered before how close Shane must be to hitting his head at any given moment; every step is perilous to Ryan now, as he skirts around tree branches and awnings that he wouldn’t have even noticed before. Obstacles spring into his periphery and he keeps ducking unnecessarily to avoid them, like he’s dodging projectiles in a video game.

He gets to his own door and realizes that of course he doesn’t have his own keys, only Shane’s. He doesn’t want to cause a scene, but there’s nothing else to do but pound on his own door.

“Shane! SHANE! Open the fuckin’ door, dude!”

His neighbor, an older woman named Mrs. Rasmussen whose groceries he carries up sometimes, opens her door to squint out at him.

“There’s no Shane here,” she scolds him. “Watch your language! There are children living in this building.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Ra—er, sorry, ma’am,” he says lamely, remembering too late that he’s not supposed to know her.

She closes the door slowly, staring at him with a suspicious, beady eye until it’s all the way latched. Then Ryan pounds again at his own door.

“Um. RYAN, PLEASE OPEN YOUR—THE DOOR. YOUR OLD PAL SHANE, WHO IS ME, IS HERE!”

*

**Shane.**

It’s the banging that wakes him up, a loud rhythmic pounding that it takes him a long, half-asleep moment to realize must be someone knocking at the door.

Then he hears the yelling.

_“YOUR OLD PAL SHANE, WHO IS ME, IS HERE!”_

That’s weird. Shane’s only half-awake, but he’s still pretty sure that Shane is him and he is Shane, so unless someone else named Shane is knocking on his door there’s something hinky going on. If it’s the Mormon missionaries trying to door-to-door convert him again he’s going to be pissed.

He fumbles for his glasses and plops them on his face, scratches his chin, and pulls his hand back in confusion when the few days’ worth of beard-growth he’s expecting to encounter isn’t there. Did he get drunk and shave last night? He’s done stranger things than that after a few beers, but still.

The pounding on the door continues, and he drags himself out of bed to go tell whoever it is to fuck off. He makes it as far as the living room before he realizes it’s not his living room at all, but Ryan’s.

Which is…different.

That sends a wave of nausea churning in his stomach, but he doesn’t have much time to sit with it, because the pounding on the door is loud and Ryan’s neighbors are going to be annoyed.

Shane opens the door and comes face to chest with a very tall, gangly person. He looks up and it’s _himself_ , staring down with wide, frantic eyes, much bigger than he ought to be. Looming over him in a way that’s truly alarming.

Shane does what any right-thinking person would do, and slams the door on himself.

*

Shane stares at the door, and at his hand. At his hand on the door, which is neither his hand nor his door.

The hand is darker than his own, golden-toned, fingertips squared off where his own are rounder. He turns it around, palm-up, and finds the pads of the fingers callused from an instrument he doesn’t play. He rolls up the arms of his shirt and his forearms are darker and more hairless than they ought to be, the musculature too defined.

_Absolutely not. I’m having a nightmare. This isn’t possible._

The knocking comes again, quieter this time, but he jumps back from the door in surprise anyway.

“Shane,” his own voice whispers at him through the door, “please let me in. It’s Ryan. I think we’ve got a Freaky Friday situation here.”

Shane steels himself and opens the door again. Seeing himself standing there is no less alarming the second time, even though he’s expecting it.

“ _Ryan_?” he whispers, conscious still of the neighbors as he stands aside to let his own body in the door.

“In the flesh,” Ryan says, barreling into the apartment, limbs flying all over like he hasn’t figured out how to puppet them yet. “Well. In _your_ flesh, I guess. How’re you doing down there? Try not to wreck my body by passing out in it, I’ve worked kind of hard on it.”

Shane has to throw himself down on the couch so he doesn’t do exactly that. His mind is clear but he’s unbearably lightheaded, his body flooded with adrenaline and fear that he’s not used to dealing with, anxious physical responses that thirty-plus years in his own body never prepared him for.

Ryan’s clearly had a little more time to sit with this than he has, if he’s cracking jokes about it already. Or maybe being in Shane’s body is having a calming effect, one that Shane’s missing dearly now.  

“Is that really what the top of my head looks like?” Ryan wonders out loud, staring down at him. “How is it possible I never noticed that weird little cowlick before?”

“Can you give me a hot second to process this?” Shane asks, holding up a hand. “I’ve only been awake for like three minutes. I slept like— _you_ sleep like the dead.”

“Yeah, when there are no ghosts around,” Ryan says, looking him up and down with an appraising eye. 

“There are never any ghosts around, Ryan.”

Ryan makes that _face_ , that indignant sour expression that he always makes when Shane plays that card, but seeing it written on Shane’s own facial features is such a trip that Shane actually pinches himself. It’s such a distinctive expression, so incongruous with the face making it, that it’s like seeing through the musculature and cartilage to the mind and soul below them.

“Hey buddy, maybe don’t go pinching things that don’t belong to you,” Ryan says.

“Well, what the fuck?”

Shane doesn’t know what else to say. What do you say when you’ve switched bodies with your best friend and suddenly you’re too short to reach any of the shelves? He’s pretty sure not even Emily Post has advice for this situation.

“Yeah, that was about where I started from also. You know what this is, right? It’s Bloody Mary’s ritual. I fucking told you something happened, dude.”

 As Ryan rambles on, explaining his theory, Shane experiences the strange urge to reach out and thwap him on the arm to shut him up. At first he thinks it’s his own self reacting to Ryan’s mile-a-minute chatter, but his usual response to that is to check out.  That’s when he understands that this must be Ryan’s _body’s_ natural instinct, less impulse control and more touch response, something his brain doesn’t have the means to reel in.

Maybe that’s why Ryan is always touching himself, rubbing his own stomach or his jaw or his neck; it’s an automatic tactile response, a way of keeping his hands occupied and to himself.

Shane sits on his hands. Then he realizes he’s sort of, kind of groping Ryan’s ass _in front of Ryan_ , so he pulls them back into his lap and lets them fall into a nervous tangle. But no, laps are bad too. He grips the edge of the couch cushion with both hands.

“What are we going to do?” he asks. Ryan shrugs, a graceless rise and fall of Shane’s sloped, bony shoulders.

“We’ve got to call Bloody Mary and tell her to fix it, I guess. Make her put us back. If we have to fly back out to New Orleans, that’s what we’ll do.”

Ryan hands Shane his own phone, and then pads into his bedroom to retrieve his own where he must have left it on the bedside table last night. He’s visibly calmer once he’s got his phone in his hand, a familiar connection to the world again.

While Ryan’s scrolling through his contacts to call Bloody Mary, Shane enters his passcode to unlock his own phone. He opens up the camera and flips it into selfie mode. Ryan’s face stares back at him through the lens, hair tousled into a mess of black by sleep. He brings his hand up to his face to touch it, and watches Ryan’s hand trace Ryan’s stronger jaw on his phone screen.

There’s a disconnect, watching himself control Ryan’s body; it’s almost like playing VR.

Ryan’s got his phone on speaker, calling Bloody Mary.

“Good morning, hon!” she chirps. “How are things with your show? Got an air date for me yet? I’m going to hold a little viewing party with some friends here.”

“The show is fine,” Ryan says, “but things in general could be better.”

“Is this—who am I speaking with?”

“This is Ryan Bergara,” Ryan says, in Shane’s voice.

“Hmm,” Bloody Mary says. “Is it? And how is your gangly copilot?”

“Funny you should mention that.” Shane can’t help jumping in here, trying to get past the pleasantries so they can figure out what the hell is going on. “I’m finding myself a little less gangly at the moment. Would love to get some of that gangle back, as a matter of fact.” 

Shane lets Ryan, who’s been awake longer and had more time to think this through, explain what he thinks must have happened: that the ritual Bloody Mary performed somehow caused them to switch bodies, plugging Ryan’s mind into Shane’s body and vice versa.

“You don’t hear about that one often, but it does sound plausible,” Mary says, and she doesn’t seem nearly as surprised as Shane would have expected her to be upon getting the news that she’s non-con body-hijacked two perfectly innocent people with her voodoo trickery.

“Does it?” he butts in, incredulous. “Does it sound _plausible_?”

“How do we fix it?” Ryan asks. “We just want, we want to go back to normal.”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you that, love,” Mary says. She doesn’t sound all that cut up about it, and frankly Shane could do with a little more urgency on her part. “All I did was invite the spirits in to do their work. What they do is their business.”

“How long will their business take, do you think?” Shane’s got that unfamiliar surge in his chest again, bubbling up from inside him and pushing out in a rising panic through Ryan’s vocal cords.

“Beats me. When they’re satisfied, they’ll leave. People always go back to themselves in the end.”

“ _Satisfied_?” Ryan asks what they’re both thinking.

“My advice to you is to focus on self-reflection,” Mary says. “Unburden your souls and the bodies will right themselves. Free your mind, and the rest will follow.”

Which, in terms of advice, is _not_ that helpful. It also might be an En Vogue lyric, but Ryan looks so blown away that Shane chooses not to point that out.

*

Ryan’s a mover. When he’s nervous or anxious or thinking something out, he moves. That must be why he’s taking Shane’s body for a cruise around the apartment and muttering to himself while Shane watches him from the couch.

Shane’s got more than enough to deal with on his end, trying to keep Ryan’s body from going into full-on panic mode as a stress reaction, talking it down with logic as best he can. He catches himself absent-mindedly stroking his neck and pulls his hand back in surprise.

“You’ve got to stop pacing, and you look like you just got off a horse,” he tells Ryan after a while. “That’s not how I walk. You’ve got to act like me, or people are going to notice. And what the fuck could we possibly tell them?”

The thing to do now is to get Ryan on task, to give him concrete things to do and plans to make. To direct his focus on something specific and useful.

“Okay, do you have a notebook around here? Let’s make a list of all the shit we need to think about so we can get through this unscathed.”

Ryan pulls out a notebook and pen from his desk to take notes. Shane can see his brain fracture a little when he puts the pen to paper and writes for the first time with Shane’s fingers. What comes out is a strange amalgamation of Ryan’s own handwriting and Shane’s, half-driven by Ryan’s mind and half by the physicality of the pen in Shane’s body’s hand.

“So I guess we need to add ‘practice each other’s’ signatures’ to the list, then,” Ryan says, watching his fingers scrawl strange loops.

Bit by bit, they spend the day working out a plan. At the office they’ll sit at each other’s desks, but try to do their own work as much as they can get away with. Their own phones and laptops they’ll keep; they’ll stick to texting and get together periodically to make important calls together.

They’ll live in each other’s apartments, because there’s no way around that one; if they carried on as normal, the neighbors would get suspicious and call the cops about the strange man who’s moved in next door.

“I have to come over lots and see Obi,” Shane says. “I wonder if he’ll notice I’m different.”

“You’ll be allergic now,” Ryan warns. “Better stock up on the Benadryl. I’m serious, don’t go fucking up my body. I want that shit back in the same condition I left it.”

“The same condition— _Ryan_. I’m not spending hours in a gym every day so you don’t lose muscle mass.”

“I want you to treat my body with the respect you would a fuckin’ national park. Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories.” 

“The saying is ‘take nothing but pictures.’”

Ryan thinks about that one for a moment, and then he makes a face. Shane’s startled at the way his nose seems to take over his face and his eyes disappear when Ryan scrunches them up like that.

“You absolutely better not take any pictures. In fact, scratch that, you’re not even allowed the memories.”

Shane laughs. He practices doing it like Ryan does, head back, slapping his chest with delight, but it’s still not quite right. Part of the problem is that he can’t fully hide his discomfort at this line of conversation.

The one topic they’ve studiously avoided so far has been: what to do about the dicks? As far as Shane knows there’s very little precedent for what’s appropriate here, how to take care of the unavoidable bodily functions without disrespect. Without crossing a line that will make Ryan uncomfortable.

The thought of _showering_ in a body not his own, and in Ryan’s in particular, makes Shane’s palms sweat. He’s got a responsibility to Ryan’s life, to his commitments, to not screw it up, and that will inevitably involve showering. He hopes Ryan feels the same way about him; that he’ll put his very best effort into the care and keeping of Shane.

Ryan sighs. That, at least, looks natural.

“Yeah, I know,” he says, as if he’s reading Shane’s mind, and his cheeks are pink. “Let’s just not—let’s not think about that for now. Everything else is…is enough.”

That seems fair enough to Shane. They’re both adults, after all. He can be professional, he can respect the line. God knows he’s had the practice.

Ryan packs a bag of things to take back to Shane’s—personal items, toiletries, his laptop and chargers. On the way out he lovingly strokes a pair of sneakers where it sits on his shoe rack.

“Are you saying goodbye to your sneaks?” Shane asks.

“Some people have cats, other people have sneaker collections,” Ryan says, and he juts his chin out as if daring Shane to point out that a living breathing pet is not the same thing as shoes no matter how dope the shoes in question are.

Shane knows better than to rise to _that_ bait.

Later that night, after Ryan’s taken a Lyft back to Shane’s apartment for the night, Shane takes his shirt off and stands in front of the mirror and just _looks_. Of course he’s seen Ryan shirtless dozens of times before, but he’s never really looked. That’s something he does Ryan the courtesy of: never looking with anything but the most passing of interest, keen to make sure Ryan knows that’s not a thing he’ll have to think about while working.

But now that he’s in this body, maybe for the long haul, he figures looking is okay. It’s not sexual looking, it’s wanting to understand how this body moves, how it works. He sends a message to the body to flex, and Ryan’s muscles and nerves obey. Shane runs his hands over arms that are way bigger than he’s used to, a chest more defined.

He leans in close to examine his face, and that’s what’s really uncomfortable: getting right up on the mirror and seeing Ryan’s big dark eyes staring back at him.

Shane finds that he likes them a little less now than he does when Ryan is behind them.

*

The first week is exhausting for both of them. Just getting acclimated to the new bodies is as tiring as a full-time job. Things that should be easy for Shane take thinking and re-thinking and strategizing.

It feels like he can’t easily reach anything in Ryan’s apartment or in the Buzzfeed canteen, which is ridiculous because Buzzfeed has loads of employees shorter than 5’9” and they seem to be doing fine. Ryan must be constantly jumping for things, or standing on furniture, or making taller people get things for him. Making _Shane_ get things for him.

And then there are the little things that Shane’s thought about in the abstract but never had to actually confront personally until now. He’s getting coffee from Starbucks on Wednesday morning when the guy behind him in line, probably mid-twenties with a stylish undercut, asks him where he’s from.

“Chicago,” he says without thinking, even though Ryan’s from Southern California. Whatever, it’s just a stranger anyway.

“No,” the guy says, “I mean, where are you _from_ ,” and then Shane thinks he does realize what he means.

“Are you fucking kidding me, dude?” He’s seen Ryan shrug off way worse than this on a regular basis, but the newness of it makes him indignant.

The guy’s eyes go wide and he backtracks furiously.

“No, not like—ugh, shit, I’m sorry. I wasn’t, I meant that you have a really interesting face. Really beautiful.”

He rests his hand on Shane’s bicep and _squeezes_.

Shane’s getting whiplash from how fast this casual interaction is shifting. At first he was sure the guy was being a racist shithead, and now he’s positive the guy is hitting on him while possibly also being a fetishizing shithead.

It’s not that Shane doesn’t get hit on; he does. But it’s mostly by women, who seem to really like the tall thing and his overall chill, non-threatening vibe. For a guy in L.A. he’s a little on the soft side, what people call “unconventionally attractive” when they’re feeling kind or “uglyhot” if they aren’t. He does pretty well if he goes looking for it, but he doesn’t get hooted at out of cars much or flirted with in coffee shops unless it’s by someone who recognizes him as a minor celebrity.

Ryan, it turns out, does. Every single day this week that Shane’s ventured out in public, some guy has given him a very obvious once-over on the street or said something in passing.

He slides into his seat at Ryan’s desk that morning, and he must be looking a little worse for wear, because Ryan looks over at him with concern. Shane’s still not used to this, to sitting at the wrong desk and seeing his own face looking at him from the next desk over.

“Everything okay?”

“You get hit on all the time,” Shane hisses. “You are like catnip to the men of Los Angeles. I can barely walk anywhere.”

Ryan just laughs.

“Yeah, earlier this year when I started lifting more it picked up precipitously,” he says, keeping his voice low so their coworkers can’t hear.

Ryan’s going to say something else, but he’s interrupted by Curly swinging by to fuss with Shane’s hair and murmur things in Spanish that Shane doesn’t understand. Shane nods and smiles and concentrates on making Ryan-y facial expressions that convey friendly discomfort.  

Over at Shane’s desk, Ryan is trying not to laugh out loud, typing away and pretending that he doesn’t mostly understand what Curly’s saying.

When Curly leaves, Shane spins his chair around. “Oh my God, he was flirting with me,” he says. “In _Spanish_. Like, I have no idea what he actually said, but I got the gist. When he comes over here for ‘friendly chats’ he is _hitting on you_.”

Ryan’s lip twitches.

“Duh.”

“Man, what a waste. All this energy expended on you and you want none of it.”

Ryan shrugs, half-focused on Shane and half on the script he’s working on for an upcoming episode. He’s never been the fastest typist, but he keeps getting tripped up by Shane’s longer fingers and having to delete whole paragraphs of gibberish text.

“No wonder you’ve chilled out so much,” Shane says. “It’s exposure therapy. You’ve been beaten down by a torrential downpour of thirst.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Ryan says, but he doesn’t dispute it. It’s not that Shane didn’t know before that Ryan is built, that Ryan is cute and has a nice smile and a nicer laugh, but it’s somehow different knowing that most people within a twenty-mile radius seem to know it too.

“No chance you’ll let me take this little red corvette out for a spin, then?” Shane asks, gesturing down at his body, and he’s 99% kidding. It’s worth it for the way Ryan coughs into his coffee.

There is that one percent of him that isn’t kidding, though, which is why he regrets the joke as soon as he says it.

The other thing about being in Ryan’s body, the other reason it’s exhausting: he is _going_ all the time. Shane doesn’t remember being this high-maintenance when he was Ryan’s age, and he certainly isn’t now. Ryan’s body is constantly asking for more food, more sleep, more…attention. Any attention.

Shane’s been trying so, so hard to ignore the physical realities of Ryan’s body, but Ryan’s body is doing its very best to not let him.

Specifically: the boners are a lot. He could do with fewer boners. It’s just— _so_ many boners.

Every time it happens, and it happens nigh-constantly, it’s a fight between his brain and the body he’s in. So far his brain has been winning every battle, but it might be losing the war. Shane knows that it would be a violation. He knows Ryan would be bothered at the thought of Shane touching him like that, even if only to scratch an itch, to satisfy a basic biological urge.

More to the point, Shane knows that if he gives in, he’ll never be able to look at Ryan with the same safe detachment he mostly manages now. That’s a barrier he’d like to leave in place, one which he needs for his own sanity.

But when he wakes up in the morning, hard and aching in Ryan’s dumb gym shorts, it’s difficult to remember that. When he scrubs himself with ruthless efficiency in the shower, turning the water colder and colder, it’s a challenge.

“For a…spin?” Ryan asks, his eyebrows converging in the middle of his forehead.

“Never mind,” Shane says, quick to reassure. “It was just a joke. I’m not. I wouldn’t.”

“I think a solo trip around the block might be okay,” Ryan says slowly, surprising him. “I’d rather you didn’t pick up any, um, passengers. Of any gender. In the corvette.”

“This metaphor is getting belabored.” Shane’s deeply embarrassed to be talking about this, and at work no less.

“I know that I’m a lot,” Ryan says. “I am high energy. In all things.”

Oh God.

Shane clears his throat. “I had, uh, noticed. Also, if I don’t feed this meat sack every hour on the hour it turns against me. It’s like the opposite of not feeding a gremlin after midnight.”

Ryan smiles, and the lines around his eyes—Shane’s eyes—crinkle in a familiar, reassuring way. Shane knows all too well what stress looks like on his own face, and that smile says Ryan’s doing okay, all things considered. He takes himself off high alert.

“Imagine how much you’d need to eat if you took it to the gym once in a while,” Ryan says pointedly.

“Is it really that important to you?”

“I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll go to the gym with me three times a week, you can take the corvette for as many spins as your heart desires. You can even do some weird shit to the corvette if you don’t tell the corvette’s owner about it and you don’t scratch the leather interior.”

Now it’s Shane’s turn to cough, surprised into temporary speechlessness. That does sound like a pretty good deal, but also a dangerous one.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think about it too hard, you might pull a groin muscle,” Ryan says, and then he tries out one of Shane’s patented winks. It’s a pretty good wink.

Shane gets a little flutter in the pit of his stomach. _Damn_. Damn, damn, damn.

*

The infuriating thing is that none of their coworkers notice anything’s different about them.

Shane and Ryan had spent that whole first weekend making elaborate plans for long-term subterfuge—practicing each other’s body language and mannerisms, watching their old videos obsessively. Ryan had made Shane walk with a book on his head like My Fair Lady to practice not slouching.

And it was all for nothing, because nobody’s paying nearly as much attention to them as they pay to each other.

It’s not that they’re great at it, either; they mess up all the time. At lunch, Shane catches Ryan rubbing his belly and staring off into space, looking decidedly un-Shane-like. He kicks him under the table.

They’re constantly failing to respond to the right name. On one memorable occasion, Kelsey tries to get Shane’s attention by saying Ryan’s name at least a dozen times, and Shane only notices when Ryan himself throws an eraser at his head.

Shane’s certain that it will be impossible to fool TJ and Mark and Devon, who are literally paid money to watch them and are about as close to Ryan and Shane experts as people can get, but to his surprise they don’t seem to notice that anything’s amiss either. They hadn’t been counting on the obvious thing: it’s such an unlikely turn of events, such a laughably wild premise, that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to look at them and think _, huh, do Shane and Ryan seem like they’ve switched bodies to you_?

Eventually Shane comes to understand that it’s also because he and Ryan have spent the last two years plus growing into each other like the roots of a tree, borrowing each other’s jokes and mannerisms and clothes until they move almost as one seamless unit, Ryan-and-Shane with a dash of Jeff Goldblum for zest.

If they are more like each other now, if the lines are blurrier, it’s a natural step in their evolution.

The biggest challenge comes the first week in November, when they’re off to film another episode of Supernatural. Having to pretend to be scared will be a test of Shane’s acting abilities, and having to pretend to _not_ be scared will be a monumentally bigger test of Ryan’s.

“Okay, remember what we talked about,” Ryan says as he eases down the freeway on the way to the airport. “Big eyes, up and to the side. Make your mouth do that gaping thing—no, not that, the other thing—yeah. And then you say?”

“Oh my God, dude, I’m freaking out right now,” Shane replies automatically, deadpan. “Or, alternatively, we’re about to get murked by this ghost and I’m gonna die a virgin.”

“Don’t you fuckin’ dare.  And if things get really intense?”

“My mind is melting,” Shane replies in a flat tone.

“Good.”

“Point of order, though. How am I going to know when it’s, as you put it, ‘getting intense’? For me it never gets intense, Ryan.”

Ryan thinks about that one, signaling to change lanes. He’s a much better driver now that he’s gotten used to Shane’s body being at the wheel.

“If I feel like you should be escalating the terror I’ll tug on my earlobe,” Ryan says. “I’ll do that thing you do where you push your hair out of your face like you don’t even care how thick and soft and shiny it is—”

“I do not do that!”

“—and then I’ll tug on my earlobe and you can get a good freak-out going.”

“Okay,” Shane agrees. “And what about you?”

“What about me?”

Ryan’s being suspiciously coy about this. It’s not a secret to either of them that pretending to be cool as a cucumber will not come naturally to him.

“How do you plan to play the skeptic?”

“Who said I was planning to? I’m going to wait for my moment, turn to face the camera head-on, and then announce that I believe in ghosts and I’m disbanding the Shaniacs and canceling the Hot Daga,” Ryan says, a big goofy grin on his face. “Now let me hear you try the theory voice again, it’s still not nasal enough. Like, if you don’t want to put your fist through a wall it’s so annoying, you’re doing it wrong.”

“You’re a real stage mom, you know that? I feel like one of those pageant kids.”

“Smile pretty,” Ryan says, pulling into LAX’s short-term parking lot with a squeal of tires.  Shane bares his teeth, really _Ryan’s_ teeth, straight and pearly-white.  

*

Shane expects the shoot to be a disaster, but instead it’s something of a revelation in more ways than one.

To start, it’s the most fun they’ve had on set together in months. It feels like they’re on the same team again, them working together to trick the world instead of sniping at each other over stupid shit.

It’s just a little awkward to be having this much fun in an axe murder house, is all.  

They’re in Detroit, a city that already feels like a ghost of a town, a specter of its former self.  Looking out the window of the rental car at the shells of burned-out houses, creeping along Woodward into the city proper, Shane’s worried it’ll be hard to have summon any fun here at all. But the vibe changes when they hit the downtown to grab an early dinner, people barbecuing together on the sidewalks and Motown pouring out of dive bars as they drive by.

After dinner they drive back out of the city to the location, a little house on a corner lot on St. Aubin Street where six people—husband, wife, and four children—were murdered with an axe back in 1929. It’s novel for Shane to be in the know on this one, to have read the story beforehand, to have practiced reading Ryan’s words in Ryan’s voice.

“So this guy—Benny Evangelist—was basically the worst cult leader in the world. Like, he wanted to lead a cult but nobody wanted to follow him, so he declared himself a prophet and started selling fake love potions out of his basement. And they didn’t work, obviously, which people who paid actual money for them were less than psyched about.”

“And this upstanding member of society ended up murdered?” Ryan asks, feigning surprise. “What a shock.”

“Dude called his basement his church, only he didn’t have any disciples so he hung _dolls_ from the _ceiling_.”

“Jesus. If he was here right now I’d murder him myself.”

“Pretty much. Shame about the…”

“The kids, yeah.”  Ryan makes a face. “We gonna run into any ghost babies tonight?”

Shane stares at him, eyes sharp, until Ryan realizes his mistake a beat later.

“Not, um. If ghosts were real, I mean. Which they _are not_.”

Good enough. Ryan’s doing better than Shane thought he would; something about pretending to be a different person has allowed him to access some of Shane’s chill, or maybe that’s Shane’s body having a palpable calming effect. Shane, on the other hand, feels way less sleepy than he usually does on these late shoots, restless in a distinctly Ryan way.

A little like he wants something to _happen_ , like he thinks something _might_ —even though historically, a whole lot of nothing ever does.

“No, the main apparition said to linger this house is the ol’ Benster himself. People claim to see a headless dude walking around—”

“Bit on the nose, don’t you think, Ryan?” Ryan asks, scratching his own. “Bit strange nobody’s caught that one on video?”

“Shut up, Shane,” Shane says, and it gives him a zing of recognition up his spine to hear himself nail Ryan’s inflection when he says it, two parts frustrated to one part fond. The success of it is like a forkful of something savory in his mouth, the seasoning just right.

So: they have fun. Shane’s in high spirits, riding a careful line between caricature and really giving himself over to it all, fidgety and bug-eyed in equal measure. Ryan’s playing his version of Shane particularly rowdy; they’ve only been in the damn house for about ten minutes before he’s loping around in a parody of Shane’s long-limbed walk and yelling for any local ghosts to come behead him and then drink soup out of his neck cavity.

They bust out their ghost-hunting props: recorders for EVP and motion detectors and (ugh) the spirit box.

By this time, Shane knows, Ryan would be really getting worked up. Ryan hasn’t thrown him the signal yet, the _hurry up and look like you’re going to piss yourself already_ signal, but it’s definitely time to ramp it up. Shane’s got the makings of a plan here, one which involves finding out how stupid he can make Ryan look on camera without giving the whole thing away.

He’s about to go into proper shrieking hysterics about some invented thing—a noise or a brush of his jacket—when, implausibly, something happens that means he doesn’t need to fake it.

Or maybe nothing happens. He can’t be sure.

What maybe happens, or maybe doesn’t happen, is that something might (or might not) slither around his ankle, where his pant leg and sock don’t quite meet, and wrap cold fingers around warm skin and _tug_.

Or maybe Shane just trips.

Either way he goes sprawling, throwing up his arms as the ground rises up to meet him to protect his face. Ryan will kill him if he breaks the nose that he’s borrowing.

“R— _Shane_ , something fucking pulled me!” Shane yelps. He’s almost academically interested to discover that the flutter of panic in his chest is real, that something in him genuinely believes he’s experienced something inexplicable and terrifying.

Ryan peers down at him with Shane’s skeptical face, hovering in a middling confused ground. Unsure if Shane is still acting or not.

“Man, I’m not kidding, something wrapped around my ankle and pulled me down,” Shane says, noting that his voice is laced with actual fear. He can tell because he’s heard Ryan sound like that a million times, high-pitched and tremulous in some dark room or another.  

Shane tries to stand. He tries to get up from where he’s sprawled, sends the message to his limbs to move, but it’s as if the message is cutting out somewhere along the way. _This is a panic attack_ , he thinks. _I’m panicking. No, Ryan’s body is panicking with me inside it._

“I can’t—I can’t move,” he croaks.

Ryan cocks his head, and then he’s making up his mind and kneeling into a crouch by Shane’s head.

“You’re fine, Ryan. I’m sure it was just, you know, you fell. People fall.”

He doesn’t look sure, though. He looks like he’s saying it because he knows Shane would say it.

When Shane still doesn’t move, Ryan squares his shoulders. He gets down on his knees and starts—collecting Shane up, pulling him into a seated position, winding a long arm around his waist to support him when he threatens to tip over again.

“You’re alright, you’re alright, it’s fine, you’ve got to sit up,” Ryan mutters, glancing at the camera and then away again, off to the side, at TJ. He shakes his head, a curt twitch of his jaw that says to cut the shot.

Shane angles his shoulder into Ryan’s side. He puts his hand on his chest and he can feel his heart beating beneath his shirt, beating like it’s trying to make a run for it. _Ryan’s_ heart, pounding warm and real inside him, pumping the blood that’s keeping Shane’s brain from dying.

He never thought of it like that before: his own mind and soul and Ryan’s heart working together to make this mess of bones and flesh into something with meaning and purpose. The most intimate, important cooperation two people will ever have, closer than a kiss, more intimate than sex.

Something inside Shane swells and contracts.

In the end the shock of feeling is what spurs Shane into motion. He reaches out for Ryan’s shirt, the red-and-black checked flannel that is Shane’s particular favorite, and grasps the familiar soft fabric at his back.

What Shane wants to do is to grab for Ryan’s hand, force it over his heart, and say _look what your body is doing for me_. _Look what I’m doing for you. Look what we’re accomplishing together._

But TJ is there, and Devon and Mark, and Shane’s not sure Ryan would react favorably to such a pronouncement even if they were alone.

“I’m okay,” he says instead, and pulls himself up on shaky knees. “I’m fine. Not gonna get murked today, folks.”

*

Two days later, the morning after their long flight back to L.A., Shane’s willpower cracks. The timing is likely not, he’s got to admit, a coincidence.

Ryan’s body is so _insistent_.  It’s always nudging at him, urging him to make a snack or have one more beer or press snooze one more time. It always wants more from him, and as time passes Shane’s getting less and less capable of pushing that down.

If Ryan hadn’t already given his tacit permission, Shane would have worked harder at resisting. Probably.

He wakes up sprawled out on his stomach, Ryan’s sheets tucked up around his waist and a raging erection pressed into the bed. It’s the seventeenth day in a row that he’s woken up hard, and something inside him—some critical arbiter of good judgment and rationality, weakened by his revelation in Detroit—just _splinters_ right down the center.  Shane’s still mostly-asleep when he angles his hips down to grind against the mattress, sighing into the pillow at the pressure.

It occurs to him that this might be an option: a way to get some relief while still preserving a mental security blanket, a shield against the gnawing guilt. A way to hold the line.

Shane tries again, another tentative, slow roll of his hips, letting his dick ( _Ryan’s dick,_ his brain whispers, and the warmth in his stomach swells even as he bats the thought down) drag and catch against the soft terrycloth of his sweats. It’s not much, but it’s a lot more than he’s allowed himself up until now and it’s so good already.

Ryan’s body is unbelievably responsive, and the pleasure centers that connect Shane’s brain to Ryan’s nerves go haywire right away with the attention after unprecedented weeks of nothing. He reaches an arm out to brace against the headboard and pushes down again, his cock trapped between his stomach and the bed.

Soon he’s got a pretty good rhythm going. It’s embarrassing to be getting off like this, humping the mattress like a desperate teenager in his sleep, but he can’t bring himself to stop. Shane grits his teeth, the cotton of the pillowcase cool against his cheek, and lets the coiling heat in his belly drive him on.

Within a couple of minutes he’s rutting desperately against the bed. It’s so much but it’s also not quite enough; pressure, but not focused enough, the contact not targeted enough. Shane whines in frustration, pressing his forehead to the pillow. It would be—it would be so _easy_ , he could just—he _could_ , Ryan as good as _said_ he could. Maybe…maybe Ryan himself already _has_.

The idea that perhaps Ryan has already faced this conundrum head-on, has taken Shane’s dick in hand (in bed, maybe, or in the shower, or in the shower at the gym, _God_ ; Shane’s head spins with the possibilities) and taken care of himself, is the last dizzying straw. Shane rolls over onto his back and shoves his hand down his sweats to curl around his cock.

 _Not mine_ , his brain screams even as his hand falls into a familiar rhythm—faster and rougher than he would use for himself if this was fully up to him—that Ryan’s body seems to know it wants.

The first touch, the first time Shane’s touched himself in Ryan’s body with intent, is fucking perfection. Shane tries to shut the guilt out, but he has an uneasy feeling that the shame is part of why it’s so good. That knowing this is Ryan’s dick pulsing hot under his hand is the primary pleasure, rather than merely incidental.

It’s the best parts of sex and the best parts of masturbation, all at once. The selfish pleasure of taking what you want for yourself without worrying about what someone else is thinking or feeling or needing, combined with the sheer thrill of someone else’s hand touching you for the first time. His brain isn’t altogether connected with the hand moving on his dick, and that disconnect is somehow everything.

When he comes, it’s a surprise. Shane knows the signs in his own body, but everything feels different now, intense and white-hot and confusing, all the wires crossed in his brain. One minute he’s got his hand wrapped around his cock, mouth pressed into the crook of his elbow so he doesn’t hear Ryan’s ragged, hoarse noises, and the next he’s shaking apart and coming in hot spurts around callused fingers and all the way up his belly and chest.

Shane lies there for a long time, bringing his breathing back down to normal and letting the post-orgasm guilt settle over him like a too-scratchy blanket. He shouldn’t have let himself do it, no matter what Ryan said.

Eventually he rolls out of bed and heads for the shower.

He makes a pit stop to stare at himself in the mirror. Looking into reflective surfaces and seeing Ryan’s face looking back at him never gets old. If Shane’s never allowed himself to think about what Ryan might look like, like this, after sex—well, now he knows. The answer is: a goddamn beautiful mess, flushed and sweating, bedhead plastered to his forehead.

Shane wishes he didn’t know it.

He takes a shower, and in the shower he gets hard again remembering the stifled little moans in Ryan’s voice, pushed into the crick of his elbow. The damage is already done, so he gives himself over to it. He takes his time, lets himself watch Ryan’s hand move on Ryan’s cock while the hot water pours down over his head. Lets himself make noise, echoing loud in the confines of the shower.

If he closes his eyes, makes it all sensation and sounds, it’s like Ryan’s in this shower with him. Touching him. Being touched.

That thought shouldn’t get him off, it shouldn’t do what it does for him. But it does, and he comes again for the second time in half an hour—something his own body hasn’t attempted in years.

Yeah, he’s fucked.

*

**Ryan.**

The holidays sneak up on them. Ryan doesn’t even realize Thanksgiving is fewer than two weeks out until he gets a text from Shane on Friday after work. Shane’s been weird all week, quiet and vague, and he hasn’t come over to hang out with Obi once since they got back from Detroit.

 _Shane_ : I got a text from my mom about coming home for Thanksgiving. What do I tell her?

 _Ryan_ : oh shit right. are we gonna parent trap this or…?

The idea of going off to Chicago alone to pretend to be Shane in front of the people who know Shane best in the whole world is intimidating. And selfishly, Ryan loves Thanksgiving with his extended family, a loud, boisterous affair with a glorious array of food spanning continents. None of it sits well with Ryan. 

 _Shane_ : As if I’m going to let you anywhere near my high school friends unsupervised.

 _Shane_ : Is it crazy if I suggest we both go to your parents’ house for Thanksgiving and then mine for Christmas?

 _Ryan_ : …yes

 _Ryan_ : that’s objectively a super weird plan that makes me feel weird but i don’t have a better one. busy tonight? if n, come over.

*

Half an hour later, Shane’s let himself into his own apartment with his own spare key. Ryan grabs him a beer, and Obi hops on his lap and starts kneading immediately; either the cat recognizes that his person is in there somewhere, hidden deep inside this strange body, or he’s drawn to Shane for mysterious catly reasons of his own.

“So…Thanksgiving,” Shane says, scratching Obi under the chin.

“I guess we can tell my parents that your parents went on a, a cruise or something, and you’re a holiday orphan. It’s always a big group, they won’t mind one more, and I don’t think they’ll notice in all the hubbub if I’m—if you’re—if _Ryan’s_ acting different.”

Shane nods. Ryan gnaws on his bottom lip.

“Christmas will be harder,” Shane says. “My family holidays are pretty…small.”

Shane looks down at Obi and starts playing with his ears, avoiding Ryan’s face. “It’s usually just immediate family and, well. So I don’t know yet how we’re going to explain that.”

It’s a lie, and Ryan recognizes it as such immediately. He knows how they’re going to explain it, and he knows that Shane knows too. Shane’s parents will assume they’re together, that they’re dating, that it’s serious enough to warrant shared family holidays, and they’ll go along with it because it’s somehow easier than even a shade of the truth.

It’s the kind of deception that feels dangerous, like something that might impact and reverberate in Shane’s real life far beyond any of the white lies they’ve told so far. He also knows Shane won’t push for it. If Ryan’s not comfortable, they won’t do it.

He doesn’t know what choice they have, short of not going to Chicago at all, and he doesn’t want to be the reason Shane can’t see his family for the holidays.

“We’ll figure it out,” Ryan says. “If they jump to conclusions, if they assume we’re, it’s not. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Is it not?” Shane asks, and his eyes come back up to look at him. Ryan has the uncomfortable experience of being confronted with that uncanny, knowing expression on his own face, which is like adding insult to injury.

“It’s really not.” Ryan pokes a little inside himself to make sure he’s telling the truth, and he finds that it doesn’t ache where it’s pressed in, doesn’t feel like a sore spot. It’ll be awkward, maybe, but it doesn’t sting like it once might have.

His whole life has been unfathomably bizarre for the last month. What’s one more thing?

“Maybe we’ll be back to ourselves by then anyway,” Shane says hopefully. Ryan feels a twinge of unexpected annoyance. He’s a real catch, after all. Shane could do worse.

“Yeah, maybe.”

They trade phones and call each other’s’ parents. They try to do this once a week or so anyway, so nobody gets suspicious. The trick is to put the parent in question on speaker and then conduct whispered, flurried negotiations behind hands to come up with on-the-fly responses that sound genuine.

Shane calls Ryan’s mom, using Ryan’s phone, to tell her he’ll be coming to Thanksgiving.

“Is it okay if Shane comes along?”

“Shane…your cohost Shane? The very tall one, with the nose?” Shane grimaces at Ryan, who’s snickering into his elbow, before answering.

“Yes, the good-looking one, that’s him. His parents are going on vacation and he doesn’t have anywhere to go for the holiday. If he doesn’t come with me he’s going to eat a pathetic microwave meal all alone.”

In typical mom fashion, Ryan’s mom falls all over herself to say that Shane’s perfectly welcome. The idea of a friend of her son sitting alone at home on Thanksgiving with Easy Mac and Netflix clearly fills her with horror.

They hang up the phone and Ryan does laugh, then. “Just you wait, you’re going to be the guest of honor. She’s going to text in about ten minutes asking what your favorite food is, and there’s going to be heaps of it.”

“Tell her hot dogs.”

“I’m not going to tell her _hot dogs_. I flat-out refuse.”

“Well, pick something good, because whatever it is you’re the one who’s gonna have to pretend to love it,” Shane reminds him.

Then something else slaps Ryan in the face, a fairly glaring sticking point that hadn’t even occurred to him until now.

“There is…hmm. There is one other thing.” Ryan sort of—giggles, because it’s funny but also really not funny. Shane must sense it, because he goes all in on rubbing Obi’s belly like he needs the mood-booster.

“Yeah?”

“Well. It’ll mostly be my dad’s family there. Aunts and uncles and cousins, you know.”

“And?”

“And they speak…well, they do speak English, sometimes. When they want to. But they also speak Spanish a lot of the time, or this hybrid Spanglish thing that my mom and my brother and I mostly understand.”

“Ryan, I don’t speak Spanish,” Shane says, aghast, pointing out the obvious.

The thing, the _one_ thing that might save them, is that Ryan doesn’t speak Spanish either. Not fluently. He knows enough to get by with people who don’t know any better, and he can read it, and he understands a good 85% of it when it’s spoken to him in short, patient sentences.

“It’ll be fine,” Ryan says, trying to sound surer of himself than he feels. “I’ll whisper the essentials to you. Or we could pretend that you—that Shane knows Spanish so I can jump in and try to help, but that might bite us in the ass if you ever meet them again.”

“Why would I ever meet your aunts and uncles and cousins again, though?” Shane points out.

“I don’t—you wouldn’t. So.”

“So, okay.”

Shane’s being weird, is the thing. Weirder than usual. He’s not usually this twitchy or avoidant. It’s not normally so difficult to get a read on him. Part of it is that all his expressions are askew now, viewed through the filter of Ryan’s facial features. But part of it is something else that Ryan doesn’t understand yet, and which he doesn’t know how to ask about.

For now, he lets it lie.

*

They drive over to Ryan’s parents’ house together on Thanksgiving morning around noon, a time Ryan chooses to minimize the amount of time they’ll have to interact with other people before the main meal is ready. It’ll be easier to skate by when everybody’s full, lounging around on couches and shit-talking the football game.

“Quick, explain all the rules of football to me in three minutes or less,” Shane says, following Ryan’s driving directions. “Since you never met a sport you didn’t have opinions about.”

“It’s Bears-Lions first, and Redskins-Cowboys later. I figure we’ll root for the Bears as a little nod to your hometown, and then in the second game we’re rooting for an asteroid to hit the field and demolish everybody. Just talk a lot of smack and say _¡ah, qué lástima!_ sarcastically when someone fucks up and you’ll be fine.”

“That’s what I always root for anyway,” Shane says, looking pleased. He spends the rest of the drive practicing saying _¡qué lástima!_ and sounding a little less like a gringo each time under Ryan’s tutelage.

At the front door they shuffle around, Ryan falling behind Shane and urging him forward, Shane wanting to fall back himself.

“Come on, man, it’s not like I can go in first,” Ryan says. “It’s _your parents’ house_ , remember?”

“Right,” Shane mutters. He steels himself, gives a perfunctory knock, and pushes in like he belongs.

It’s all a whirlwind of people and noises and delicious smells, as Ryan knew it would be. Ryan’s little second-cousins are running around; they’ve already gotten into some of his and Jake’s old toys and strewn them out all over the living room floor. The women are in the kitchen, clustered around pots and pans, while the men are around the TV watching the first game.

In a lot of ways it’s a very traditional Thanksgiving, even though it won’t be quite what Shane’s used to. For some reason it matters a lot to Ryan that Shane should feel at home here, feel welcome. It’s not that he’s worried his family won’t make a good impression. It’s just surprising how much he wants this to go well.

It feels very important that Shane like his parents, that his parents like Shane—or the version of Shane that Ryan can give them, as honest as he can muster.

They’d spent some time over the weekend with flashcards of Ryan’s relatives; Ryan had quizzed Shane relentlessly on names and faces until he’s got everybody’s names and their relationships to each other down.

Ryan’s mom is on Shane within moments for a hug, a ladle tucked under her arm.

“Ryan, it’s been weeks, you must visit more! I made gyoza, I hope your friend likes—”

She pulls back from Shane and looks at him closely for the first time. She squints at him, like some part of her can tell that the person looking back from behind Ryan’s eyes is not, in fact, her son.

“You look different.”

“I haven’t been working out as much,” Shane offers.

“Maybe that’s it,” she agrees, but she looks dubious. She turns to Ryan. “And you’re Shane, of course. I watch all your videos. Very tall, very handsome. Like John Cusack.”

Ryan doesn’t know what to say to that, what Shane would say to that, but he’d certainly be gracious. Shane demonstrably does _not_ look like John Cusack, but it’s high praise because his mom’s seen Say Anything at least ten times.

“Thanks. You have a lovely home. Dinner smells amazing, I do love gyoza.”

Ryan’s mother beams.

“Of course he loves gyoza. And you should see the bird this year, Ryan, it’s magnificent. Claudia won’t let me get near it.”

“She never does,” Shane says with an easy smile, and Ryan breathes a little easier knowing Shane has been paying attention to the steady stream of Bergara family gossip Ryan’s been feeding him for the last week.

They hang out in the living room for a while, shooting the shit while kids dart around underfoot, and then Shane wanders into the kitchen with Ryan in tow to greet Ryan’s aunts, all of whom swoop down with hugs for them both. They’re navigating around the kitchen in a well-choreographed dance, surrounded by a veritable smorgasbord of food that Ryan can’t wait to put in his mouth; turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy, but also the gyoza, and chiles rellenos and empanadas. A pot of sopa azteca simmers next to cranberry sauce on the stove. 

Ryan’s aunt Lis shoves a spoonful of something in Shane’s mouth, and his eyes go wide as he swallows.

“Holy sh—wow, that’s _so good_ ,” he says, and she laughs, a tinkling bell of a laugh around straight white teeth.

“ _Sí, lo sé_ ,” she says. “But thanks as always for the ego boost, _sobrino_.”

Ryan can tell from Shane’s sloping posture that he’s getting overwhelmed. It is a lot, to walk into a room full of exuberant people you don’t know, who all think they know you. From his new spot on the outside Ryan can see how wonderful it all is, but also how _much_.

“Hey Ryan,” Ryan says, catching Shane’s eye to offer him a break. “Why don’t you show me around before we eat? I want to see your old room.”

Lis says something to Claudia under her breath, quickly and in Spanish, and Claudia laughs and hits her on the arm with the tongs she’s holding. Ryan only gets a hint of the gist, which might be “Don’t spoil your appetite,” and he can feel his face go red.

Claudia notices immediately.

“Whoops, _él te comprende_! Ryan, you didn’t tell us your friend knows Spanish. Warn a lady next time.”

Shane’s head is swiveling back and forth.

“Oh, he, um, took some in college.”

“ _Lo siento_ ,” Lis twinkles at Shane. “Give him the grand tour, Ryan. But not too grand, we eat in twenty.”

Ryan can hear them laughing again as he and Shane leave the kitchen, and his mom tutting with pretend disapproval.

*

They end up in the downstairs den, on the couch, where it’s quiet. Shane spends a little time sitting there and breathing in and out, restoring himself to full calmness. Ryan gives him a minute and then nudges his foot into Shane’s.

“How are you doing, big guy?”

“Your family’s so friendly,” Shane says. “Like, not—my family’s friendly too, just, there aren’t as many of them. I was hoping your body would recognize your house and chill the fuck out, but it didn’t.”

“You did a really good job, though. It’s early yet, but I think we’ll get away with this.”

“What was that about, back there?”

“Oh. Nothing,” Ryan says, and then he realizes belatedly that it would have been less conspicuous to relay the joke. Then they could laugh it off.

“It was obviously something. You went all red. You’re all red again right now.”

“Only because you’re pale as fuck,” Ryan says, but without bite. “It was—it was a dumb joke about us sneaking off before dinner for a quickie.”

“Hey, man,” Shane says, his voice measured, his own nerves forgotten now that he has someone else’s issues to collate and manage. “I’m sorry if this is going to make things weird for you with your family. I didn’t think it would.”

Honestly, Ryan _had_ kind of thought it would. He’s got a lot of good friends, some of them he’s had for fifteen years, and he’s never brought them to family Thanksgiving. It was only ever his girlfriends, and that’s a precedent that’s hard to overturn now.

“It’s really not that big of a deal,” Ryan says. He means it. Things like this, stupid misunderstandings, don’t seem important when you can’t hug your own mom properly because she doesn’t recognize you.

Ryan only realizes that Shane’s been holding his jaw too tight when it relaxes into softness.

“This must be as hard for you as it is for me,” Shane says. “Being here with your family, and them not knowing you.”

“It’s better than not seeing them at all.”

Shane sits there on the couch, winding his hands together, wiping them on the legs of his jeans. He takes Ryan in, sprawled across his side of the couch, limbs he still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of tucked under him.

“Come here,” Shane says. “Let me show you a cool party trick. A thing about me. I want to see if it—I want to see what happens.”

 _That’s_ not suspicious at all.

Ryan scoots closer anyway, because he’s curious, and because Shane’s the only person he can be his unguarded self with right now. The only person who understands how untenably weird his life has become. It feels right to be close.

Shane reaches out a tentative hand and lays it on the back of Ryan’s neck. Ryan sits very still.

Shane’s hand moves upward, slowly, to cup the back of Ryan’s head. Then his fingers start— _massaging_.

“Shane, what the fuck are— _oh_.”  All of a sudden, with no warning, Ryan feels the tension leak out of his shoulders and back. He slumps down a little, melting into the couch. Shane smiles his crooked smile and scratches with more pressure at Ryan’s head. He’s got to be mussing up Ryan’s hair, but Ryan doesn’t care; he just tips over like he has no control over his body until his head is in Shane’s lap.

Which is, yeah, it’s weird, but Ryan’s too blissed out to care. All his attention is on Shane’s hand on his head where it’s digging into his scalp, on Shane’s thumb where it’s massaging in small rhythmic circles into the crown of Ryan’s head, into the spot above his ear, right at the juncture of cervical spine and skull. A full-body shiver runs through Ryan from end to end, making his toes curl.

It’s—there’s no part on Ryan’s own body that feels like this, that turns his entire body to mush. He has pleasure points, like anyone, but nowhere that another person could touch and make him immediately unfit for public consumption.

“Holy fuck,” he whispers, tipping his head to the side to give Shane better access, pressing his cheek into the thigh of Shane’s jeans. “I can’t believe this whole time your giant noggin had a _purpose_.”

“Hmmm,” Shane hums in agreement. “Great, right?”

“Hhhh—” Ryan starts a little moan, and then he bites it back when he realizes he’s hard in Shane’s stupid chinos. Like, painfully, mind-numbingly, attention-grabbingly hard. There’s no point hiding it from Shane either, because Shane must have known what would happen when he did it. The fucker.

Ryan starts to laugh.

“Jesus Christ, that’s—um. How do you get haircuts?”

“I know my barber really well,” Shane says darkly, which makes Ryan laugh harder.

He should tell Shane to stop the head massage, tell him that this too fucking weird to be believed, lying here on the couch with a boner and moaning into Shane’s leg, but Ryan doesn’t say stop. It feels too good. It’s too much of a relief to be turned on and feel only pleasure and wonder instead of gnawing guilt.

Eventually, though, it gets to be a little much. The pleasure keeps building and building, and Ryan doesn’t know Shane’s body well enough to know whether his friend has secretly, the entire time they’ve known each other, been the kind of person who could come in his pants from a scalp massage. It’s too late to find a tactful way to ask.  

“We should probably go see if dinner’s ready,” Ryan says faintly.

“Yeah?” Shane asks, and he runs his finger through the part in Ryan’s hair. Then he spans as much of the crown of Ryan’s head as he can with one hand and clenches in, hard. Ryan’s hips jerk up. "I’ll stop if you want. Obviously.”

“What the fuck kind of cheat code to your body is this?” Ryan asks, breathing heavy. He’s—it feels an awful lot like he’s actually _close_ , he thinks, which is impossible, and _yet_.

“Why do I feel like I’m going to regret letting you in on this particular secret?”  Shane’s fingers lay in on a sensitive place above and behind Ryan’s right ear.

Just then, Jake pops his head in around the door.

“Hey guys, Mom says the meal’s almost—oh.”

He stares at them from the doorway. Ryan knows how this must look: like Ryan’s sitting on the couch with Shane’s head in his lap, stroking Shane’s hair lovingly. Even if Jake _doesn’t_ notice the hard-on it’s not great, and if he does it means torment for the rest of Ryan’s natural life.

“Um,” Shane says, hand still fisted in Ryan’s hair. Ryan’s got to hand it to him, because that’s exactly what Ryan would say in this situation. A stellar acting choice.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” Ryan says, even though all three of them know that it’s at least a _little_ what it looks like. It’s just what you have to say.

“Right, well,” Jake says, shaking his head, turning on his heel to head back upstairs. “Whatever. There’s food.”

“Your brother’s a weird dude,” Shane remarks as Ryan sits up.

“This is one of those ‘if you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones’ things,” Ryan says, covertly adjusting himself in his pants.

*

After the meal, which is delicious, and the football game, which is excruciating, Shane drives Ryan home.

It’s an awkward ride.

They’re five minutes away, maybe less, when Shane speaks. “I’m really sorry, that was—”

“It’s fine, you didn’t mean—”

“No, I did mean, though,” Shane says, an air of finality in his voice. “I knew what would happen and I did it anyway. I’ve always worked so hard to not.”  He stops abruptly, mid-way down a train of thought Ryan can’t follow.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Like, I’m not mad, but I don’t understand the words you’re saying in the order you’re saying them in.”

“Please don’t play dumb, Ryan. You know. With you, I have a line, and I don’t cross the line. Ever. But something about this whole mindfuck-bodyfuck-whatever-the-fuck,” and Shane gestures down at himself, at Ryan’s body, “has just obliterated the line.”

“You have a line,” Ryan repeats.

“That’s what I said,” Shane says. “And I fucking, I took the corvette for a spin around the ol’ block like an _idiot_ and now I can’t get any distance from you because I’m _in you_ ,” and he winces at the phrasing and trails off again. Ryan can see the pulse pounding in his neck.

“Shane,” Ryan says slowly, trying to workshop it in his head even as he says it, so it comes out as right as he can make it. “It’s not news that sometimes you like guys and that I am a guy. It’s not the end of the goddamn world if you’re not always a saint about it. Nobody’s getting hurt.”

“ _I’m_ going to get hurt,” Shane says, making a tiny frustrated noise, and his hands wrap around the steering wheel so hard his knuckles go white. “The line isn’t about guys, or about straight guys, or about coworkers. It’s about _you_.”  

“Oh.”

Ryan feels naïve, clueless, stupid. He hadn’t realized that their friendship was so precarious, that the only things holding it in a safe place were Shane’s determination and best intentions and his own blundering obtuseness.

He feels as if they’re suspended in the air, pivoting on a point like a spinning top that’s starting to wobble. Soon it’s going to topple one way or the other, and he has time—just a little time, maybe only seconds in the grand scheme of things—to influence which way it falls.

Ryan doesn’t want to fuck it up, but he also doesn’t know how not to. He wants to stop the top in mid-spin while he figures it out.

“Can we just—put a pin in this?” he asks, a little desperate, as they pull into Shane’s apartment complex.

Shane is all he has right now, the only person who sees him for who he is. His entire field of vision has narrowed to a tiny pinprick of light, and Shane on the other end of it. The fact that he doesn’t know how to fix whatever is fracturing between them makes all the fear neurons in his brain fire at once.

“A pin?”

“I need time. This is an awful lot, today, from all sides. I think I need to do what Mary suggested and, you know, self-reflect.”

“Jesus, Ryan. I’m not saying I need anything from you at all,” Shane says, looking stricken. “This isn’t about _pushing_. I’m not trying to manipulate you into—ugh. I’m just telling you I can’t do this forever.”

“You won’t have to,” Ryan says. “I’m going to figure it out. _Shane_. I promise I will.”

Shane looks at him and shrugs. Ryan knows what exhaustion and misery look like on his own face, and they’re written all over it now. His instinct tells him to reach out and touch, to wrap a hand around Shane’s wrist, but the logical part of him thinks that in this specific case it would hurt rather than help.

Instead Ryan knocks twice on the dashboard, tells Shane to drive safe, and eases out of the car. He hits his head on the doorframe as he goes, the first time he’s done that in weeks, and slinks up to Shane’s apartment seeing stars.

*

Ryan spends most of December diligently self-reflecting. He’s not sure how Shane spends it, because he doesn’t see a lot of Shane.

That’s not quite true; they see each other all the time at work. They film together, they edit together, they eat lunch together. Shane still comes over to see Obi a few times a week, but they don’t really talk. When Shane looks at him, it’s a little like Shane is looking _through_ him.

What used to be a line is now a wall, a firm barrier no hands or feelings can pass through.

So, Ryan has a lonely month. He lays out every piece of his life and he takes a good hard look at it from top to bottom; at his family, at his work, at his finances, at his friends. At his—Shane. He looks at that particularly closely.

He pulls out the feeling of lying on the couch, head tipped back into Shane’s lap, hard in his jeans and feeling truly like himself for the first time in a month. He examines his own desperation that his parents like Shane, that Shane feel at home with his family, and tugs at it like a loose thread. He looks over at Shane, propped up on the far end of the couch with Obi in his lap and a book in his hand, and thinks: _why won’t you look at me._

He digs deeper still, to what brought this whole situation about in the first place. Their stupid escalating fights, their constant picking, their increasingly combative attitudes on- and off-camera. He thinks he figures it out, eventually: it’s Ryan, enforcing his stupid performance of bro-dudeness, and Shane, enforcing his stupid line. 

Two barriers running parallel, feeding each other and preventing them from just _being_ around each other.

But Shane won’t look at him, and Shane won’t talk to him, and Shane won’t touch him, and Ryan’s having a solitary, confusing December. That’s probably why he ends up in a gay dive bar in Silver Lake on a Tuesday night, when he’s not likely to run into anyone who knows Shane’s face.

He sits at the bar nursing a beer, waiting for something to happen. Eventually, something does happen. A man takes the seat next to him, good looking in that same hipstery way that everybody is up here. Very tall hair, a well-groomed beard, tattoos. The guy buys Ryan another drink. They talk. The guy puts his hand on Ryan’s knee, and Ryan lets him.

“I want to see if I can guess how tall you are,” the guy says with frank appreciation. “You seem tall. Six three?”

“Six four,” Ryan says.

“Like a California Redwood,” hipster dude says, and his hand slides higher up Ryan’s leg, and Ryan’s _nervous_ , and not uninterested, and nervous about that too. “I’d climb that.”

“I’m from Illinois,” Ryan says, nonsensically. And then he blurts out, “I’m nervous,” and the guy laughs at him and reaches up to push a piece of hair back from Ryan’s face.

“Hi Nervous, I’m Atticus,” he says. Ryan gives him a genuine laugh back, because such a terrible joke deserves acknowledgment, and also because of course this guy’s name is fucking _Atticus_. Ugh, he can’t take that seriously. He resolves to think of him as Hipster Beard.

In the end Hipster Beard pushes Ryan up against the wall of the men’s room and kisses him fiercely, gropes Ryan’s hard dick through his pants and whispers _big all over_ into his ear, and Ryan learns what he came here to find out.  

He pulls back, breathing hard, and wriggles away. His face feels rubbed raw from the beard-burn.

“I’m so sorry. I can’t do this. Like, I want to—I actually _do_ want to, so that’s a thing I guess—but I can’t. It’s not my call.”

Hipster Beard looks up at him, skeptical. Ryan’s still not used to how everybody has to look up at him now. “Is this a weird kink thing?”

“No, it’s just a weird thing. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“This scene gets freakier every day. Can I…give you my number, in case something changes?”

“I know,” Ryan says, even though he doesn’t know. “Sorry again, Hi- _Atticus_. You seem dope and I think it would’ve been really fun. Yeah, if you want to text some time, maybe.”

He saves Atticus’s number under “Hipster Beard Burn” in his phone.

He does think it would have been fun. In the Lyft on the way back to Shane’s apartment (which he’s been increasingly thinking of as his apartment), he adds this night to the top of the pile of things to examine.

Ryan had almost gone home with the guy. He would have, if he’d been himself, in his own body. The only thing that stopped him, when push came to shove, was the Shane of it all.

No passengers, Ryan told Shane nearly two months ago. Test-drive the car but don’t pick anybody up. Shane hadn’t said that back to him, but Ryan’s sure it was implied. You can’t have sex with somebody while in your friend’s body, without said friend’s explicit permission. It would be a violation and maybe also a health risk.

He wonders what Shane would have said, if Ryan had asked for that permission.

But Ryan had wanted to go through with it, and _that’s_ what matters. That’s the new thing, the his-life-blown-wide-open thing. He’s doing the work, and he hopes that somewhere out there in the ether, Bloody Mary’s spirits are paying fucking rapt attention.

“I do too know myself, you smug ghost fucks,” Ryan tells the chilly night air as he tumbles out of the Lyft.

“You tell ‘em, my guy,” his driver says, pulling away from the curb with a wave.

 *

A week before Christmas, Shane comes over, and he hands Ryan his phone with an air of resigned determination, and Ryan calls Shane’s mom.

“Hey Mom,” Ryan says, and then he lets her talk about her book club drama for the designated two and a half minutes, as is customary. When they hit the spot where she has to pause to take a deep breath, he jumps back in; they’ve done this enough that he knows Sherry pretty well by now, even though she doesn’t know him at all. “I wanted to talk really quickly about Christmas plans.”

“I’ve got your room all set up for you! I can’t wait to see my boys! Scott gets in on the 22nd, were you planning—”

“I’d like to bring Ryan with me, if that’s okay. You remember Ryan?” 

Shane’s mom is silent for a long moment, processing this information.

“Ryan, from your show? Of course we know Ryan, hon.”

She’s clearly gesticulating wildly at Shane’s dad on the other end, and in a few seconds he picks up on another line. _The kitchen phone_ , Shane mouths.

“What’s up?” Shane’s dad is a loud phone-talker, and Ryan always has to hold the phone away from his ear.

“Shane’s bringing someone home for Christmas, Mark!” Shane’s mom says, and she sounds excited now. Like it doesn’t happen often.

“That’s great, Shane, who—”

“It’s _Ryan_ ,” Sherry says, and Ryan can almost hear the italics in her voice for emphasis. Like this is something they’ve got a fucking running bet on, or something. Shane’s dad cackles. Ryan chances a glance over at Shane and Shane’s got his hands over his face, his neck pink and splotchy with embarrassment.

Sherry’s off a mile a minute then, talking about what she’s making for Christmas dinner (a ham), asking if Ryan has any allergies, asking if it’s okay that Ryan stays in Shane’s room (“Yes,” Ryan says, watching Shane slide silently off his chair and onto the floor in a miserable puddle), asking him to text ideas of what Ryan might like for Christmas.

Ryan lets her talk for a while, but he’s barely listening. He’s distracted by Shane, who is tucked up on the floor, leaning against a leg of the kitchen table and making faces at every third word out of his mom’s mouth.

They sign off with love, as always, and when Ryan hangs up he slides down onto the floor next to Shane.

“I don’t know why you’re hiding under the table. It wasn’t that bad. Sweet, really.”

“I think I was hoping for a little more surprise.”

“I mean, they know you’ve dated guys, so—”

“Well, maybe a little less unabashed glee, then. You heard my mom. She’s basically planning our wedding, I thought she was going to ask what flowers we want for the church.”

“Hey now, I haven’t settled on a church wedding,” Ryan quips, and Shane smiles feebly. “It’s nice to have such a supportive family. She wants you to be happy.”

The unspoken _she doesn’t know you’re not happy_ lingers in the air between them.

“I hate disappointing people,” Shane says. “And when everything goes back to normal they’ll be disappointed, and that’s the best-case scenario.”

Ryan can’t help but feel that there might be other best-case scenarios, that maybe Shane’s not thinking big enough. He reaches out to press his thumb to a spot on Shane’s bare ankle between bone and tendon, the lightest of pressure just to say he’s here. Shane lets him do it, sits there for a good minute with his head against the base of the table, and then he pulls his legs away with a sigh.

*

**Shane.**

When their plane lands at O’Hare on Christmas Eve morning, Scott is there waiting for them in the terminal with a sign that says “IDIOTS.”

“Hey, little bro,” he says, pulling Ryan into a hug. He means little in more than one way; he’s older than Shane, but also _taller_ , and he never misses a chance to rub it in.

“Hey Ryan,” he says—they’ve met before, plenty, so at least this doesn’t have to be weird—and he pulls Shane into a hug too. Shane leans into the hug, clutching Scott harder than he needs to, probably harder than is seemly. It’s been a really long time since he touched anyone in a meaningful way, or anyone touched him.

Shane feels too weird seeking physical affection from anyone who doesn’t know he’s not Ryan, even though Ryan’s friends are a touchy bunch. He can’t look for a hook-up because that’s unethical. He can’t seek physical affection from the one person who knows his reality because that way lies madness. That way is a slippery slope to disaster.

So Shane lets himself hug Scott for a moment too long, smelling familiar home smells. When he pulls back he realizes his hands are shaking and he shoves them in his pockets.

“Don’t be nervous, they’re going to love you,” Scott says, misunderstanding. To Ryan he adds, “Your dude’s shivering like a chihuahua, what the fuck did you tell him?”

“I told him Mom was going to make him try wedding cake samples until he pukes,” Ryan says, and Scott barks out a laugh.

“Yeah, maybe. She’d just about given up on you, man. She called me in paroxysms of glee last week after you called. She didn’t say the words _I told you so_ , but she was damn well thinking it. Congratulations, she’s going to be unbearable now.”

Shane’s heart sinks into his shoes. This, _this_ right here, is what he’s been afraid of. That people will get attached to Ryan, to the idea of Ryan in his life like this, and that their excitement will rub off on him until he’s attached too.

Well. More attached.

The air outside is bitter cold, the sky blue and cloudless. As they walk to Scott’s car, Shane can see Ryan trying with all his might not to reveal how miserably cold he is. Ordinarily Ryan would be complaining up a storm by now, but Shane doesn’t think Scott knows that and he can’t bring himself to do the whole performance right now.

When they get to the car, Ryan slides into the backseat. He nudges his head to Shane, and then to the front.

“You take shotgun. I’ve seen it all before.”                 

Ryan’s giving him a gift—time to talk to his brother, even though his brother doesn’t know that’s what’s happening—and Shane is grateful. They pass the ride in friendly chatter, Ryan chiming in from the backseat sometimes, and for a half an hour everything feels almost as it was. If Shane closes his eyes, if he doesn’t listen to the cadence of the voice coming out of his mouth, he can pretend his life is normal.

When they pull up to the suburban two-story it’s too soon. Shane’s dad always gets way too into Christmas, and sure enough, this year he’s got one of those appalling blow-up inflatable nativity scenes parked right on the front lawn.

“Wow,” Ryan breathes, caught off guard by it. “It’s somehow both tacky and sacrilegious at the same time.”

Shane’s mom greets them at the door, and she’s wearing a red sweater with a llama on it. The llama’s wearing a red and green scarf with actual tassels hanging off the front.

“Oh my god,” Ryan says under his breath. Shane shrugs; his family is definitely embarrassing, but whose isn’t? He’s so happy to see her he could cry.

She catches Ryan up in a hug and fusses over him, telling him he looks tired and his hair needs cutting (Ryan shoots a look at Shane over her shoulder). Then she comes for Shane and gives him such a good, thorough mom hug that he feels real tears prickle in his eyes. It’s weird to cling to her like this—as far as she knows, they’re practically strangers—but he can’t help it.

“Aren’t you sweet,” she says. “Come in, you must be freezing. I made pierogi!”

Pierogi. Gyoza. Shane’s struck by how lucky he and Ryan both are. If they have to do this long-term, traveling together, living out of each other’s pockets, eating their moms’ dumplings together, maybe it’s not the end of the world after all. Maybe there’s a version of that life that works out okay.

Ryan pulls him aside once they’re in the foyer, unwinding scarves and hanging up coats and kicking off boots. He reaches down and swipes his thumb across Shane’s cheek, under his eye, and it comes away wet. Shane watches, dumbstruck, as Ryan turns away and brings his thumb to his mouth.

“Did you just _taste_ my _tear_?”

“No,” Ryan says, but he looks shifty. “I definitely didn’t do that. Why would I do that? I already know what they taste like, they’re _my tears_.”

“Hmm,” Shane says.

They make a pit stop in the living room to drop off presents under the tree. Scott and Shane’s dad have disappeared upstairs, taking their bags up to Shane’s room, and his mom’s in the kitchen fixing them hot tea; Shane can hear her humming “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” under her breath along with her iPod as she heats up the kettle.

Ryan stares around the room, taking in the vibe. Shane’s parents fully believe in decking all the halls with boughs of holly, so the room is dripping with Christmas décor. The tree, the biggest possible tree they could fit in under the ceiling, looms in the corner.

Ryan goes over to take a closer look, dumping an armload of gifts at the base of the tree.

“I bet I can guess which of these hideous childhood arts and crafts projects are yours,” he says, running his fingers long a wooden painted ornament in the shape of the bat signal. “This one for sure.”

“Got it in one,” Shane says.

Ryan meanders over to the fireplace. There are five stockings hung by the chimney with care, including a brand spanking new one that says “Ryan” in handmade cursive. 

“Your mom made me a stocking. With glitter puff-paint.”

“I guess she did,” Shane says. He can feel the panic rising within him, cresting as easily as it always does in Ryan’s body, a simple immediate tip from fine into _not fine_. It all feels so permanent, and he knows that it isn’t. That it can’t be. “My family gets pretty into Christmas.”

Ryan raises his eyebrows in agreement. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m glad to be here, I guess. It’s good to see them. I’m just…should we be talking about a long-term plan, here? For if we don’t go back to normal? We’ve been assuming it’ll happen eventually, but what if it doesn’t?”

Shane’s starting to wonder what’s worse, what will cause him the most pain; that this ends, or that it never ends.

Ryan gnaws his lip. If Shane ever does get his body back, there’s going to be a permanent sore spot on the middle of his bottom lip where Ryan’s worried his teeth through the skin.

“I think we do this, don’t we? What other choice do we have? Unless we never want to see our families and friends again.”

“You want a wife, though. You want kids. Ryan, you want kids _so bad_.”

“I want a family,” Ryan corrects, which feels like a small but crucial adjustment. And then: “Wait, do you not want kids?”

This suddenly feels like an enormous conversation to be having with a person you’re not even dating in the middle of your parents’ living room while an insane-looking Elf on the Shelf glowers down at you from the mantle. Shane’s not even entirely sure he’s having the conversation he thinks he’s having.

“I want kids,” Shane says. “I want kids with someone who wants to have kids with me, is all. Not with someone who’s stuck with me because I accidentally made off with his body.”

“I can think of worse co-parents,” Ryan says. “I think if we had to, we would figure something out.”

Shane thinks about this, about the possibility of putting together some kind of permanent platonic life partner situation with Ryan and what that might look like. They’d have to come to…arrangements…for some things, but it could work. Shane would fall in love with him, inevitably, and spend the rest of his life in a half-content, half-pining no-man’s-land.

But if he’s honest with himself, that’s where he’s at already.

The stakes would just be higher. Pets, and kids, maybe, and a fundamental change to their working lives once it got around the office. No ability to throw his hands up and walk away with Ryan’s body and start a brand new life, somewhere else—something that, in his darker moments, he’s let himself contemplate.

“We’ve gotta stop saying the k-word under this roof right now,” Shane says with grim finality. “If my mother hears it she will frog-march us to the county courthouse, and then to the adoption agency the second the ink’s dry on the marriage license.”

Ryan snickers, but he must intuit that Shane is only partly kidding because he does drop it.

Weirdness aside, it’s one of the best nights Shane’s had in months. Now that he’s around his family he realizes how lonely he’s been lately, how isolated. He’s on guard all the time, but especially with Ryan’s buddies. At work he’s caught between keeping up his performance and monitoring Ryan’s, but also the delicate balance of _avoiding_ Ryan without making it obvious that he’s doing it.  And at home, in Ryan’s apartment, no pets and no roommates, he’s got nothing but his own voice in someone else’s head.

So despite the circumstances it’s hard to feel anything but warm, now, eating his mom’s pierogi and watching Ryan pretend with all his might that he likes cabbage. Listening with fascination as Ryan tries his hand at Shane’s impressions, Christopher Walken by way of Shane’s voice as piloted by Ryan’s brain. After dinner, watching Ryan lose spectacularly at charades, and exchanging a private smirk with Ryan when Shane’s dad remarks on how unusual that is.

Later, they put on _It’s a Wonderful Life_ , a family Christmas Eve tradition. Shane and Ryan are on the couch together, what Shane considers a safe distance apart that won’t raise suspicions. But through the movie, Ryan starts inching closer. “You want the moon, Mary? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down,” George Bailey says, and Ryan scoots against him.

By the time George is wishing he’d never been born, Ryan’s got his arm around Shane, pulling him in close. He’s stroking the side of Shane’s neck with a long finger. Shane stops paying attention to the movie. He knows that this is dangerous, that he should come up with an excuse to move away—get up and go to the bathroom, or a glass of water—but he doesn’t want to. So he doesn’t.

“You really sold that one,” Shane says as he follows Ryan up the stairs to bed. Ryan stops abruptly at the top of the landing, unsure where to go, and Shane puts his hand on the small of Ryan’s back to lead him down the hall to the furthest bedroom.

“Yeah, well, I don’t half-ass shit,” Ryan says. “I only whole-ass them.”

“This, from the man who looked up how to do a séance on Wiki-How _in the middle of the séance_. I ask you,” Shane says, throwing open the door to his childhood room.

“Also, I wanted to,” Ryan says. “Earlier when Scott hugged you I thought you were going to cry. And then your mom hugged you and you _did_ cry. People need to be touched, dude. I can’t have you wandering around in my body, tearing up when creeps brush against you on the metro.”

Shane supposes this is a fair point, although he doesn’t often take the metro. The longer this goes on, the longer he and Ryan isolate themselves from normal life experiences, the more Shane worries those parts of him will atrophy and start to die. 

Not that it’s the _very_ worst thing about this whole situation, but Shane hasn’t had sex in over two months and he’s starting to think he’s going to forget how.

“Is it cool if I grab a shower? I still feel gross from the plane,” Ryan asks, tossing his phone on the bed and rooting around in his suitcase for a set of Shane’s flannel pjs.

‘Yeah, second door on your right. There’s towels and washcloths in the white cabinet.”

Ryan disappears down the hall, and Shane settles on the bed to think, and to contemplate the bed and how truly not big enough it is for two people. He’s still thinking when a text comes in on Ryan’s phone, but he looks up at the noise, lets himself glance at the screen.

Oh. Huh. That’s going to warrant a follow-up question or two.

*

When Ryan gets back from his shower, Shane’s arranged himself in the chair in the corner, Ryan’s phone in hand. Shane wishes he had a fluffy white cat in his lap to stroke, because he feels rather like a supervillain waiting to begin the interrogation.

“Hello, _Ryan_ ,” he says, once Ryan’s closed the door behind him. “If that is your real name.”

“What?”

Ryan sees his phone in Shane’s hand, then. He shifts from one foot to the other. He senses that he’s in hot water, clearly, he just doesn’t know why.

“So, quick q,” Shane says, all casual. “Why does someone named—oh, what was it?— _Hipster Beard Burn_ want to get his mouth on your big dick? Or, sorry, wouldn’t that be _my_ big dick?”

Ryan gapes at Shane. He swallows visibly. He sits down on the edge of the bed.

“His actual name is Atticus,” Ryan says. “I met him at a gay bar in Silver Lake.”

 _Lot to unpack there_ , Shane thinks. He starts with the obvious place, the place where he feels on the firmest ground.

“Ryan,” Shane says, as calm as he can manage. “Please tell me you didn’t have sex with someone named _Atticus_ in a dirty bar bathroom while in my body.”

“I didn’t!” Ryan squeaks. He clears his throat. “Er, I didn’t. I wouldn’t have, that’s. We just made out a little in a dirty bar bathroom and then I bailed. I was testing a theory, it was science—”

“What theory?”

“The theory that I might want to, um, with a guy.”

“You might want to _um_ with a guy,” Shane repeats. He tries to figure out how to ask what he has to ask without betraying the degree to which it is wildly relevant to his interests.

“Yes?”

“So did you? Want to _um_?” Less smooth than he’d hoped for, but you can’t win ‘em all. Shane wishes one of them would go ahead and say _fuck_ so they can stop acting like middle schoolers about this.

 Ryan settles back on the bed, arms crossed over his chest. Shane recognizes it as the classic Ryan Bergara defensive posture, re-enacted with too-long limbs and too-narrow shoulders.

“I did want to,” Ryan says. “I didn’t do it, obviously, but I wanted to. I had the feeling maybe I would want to, but I had to be sure before—”

“ _Before_?” Shane asks. He’s having trouble thinking straight, his mind is a series of _?????????_ instead of real thoughts which he might then transmute into real words.

“I just had to be sure.”

Shane doesn’t want to throw a wrench in this thrilling new development, he _really_ doesn’t, but it seems to him like there might, just might, be a logical flaw in evidence here.

“And it didn’t occur to you that maybe you only thought you wanted to because my body, which you are currently inhabiting, wanted to? Like, you don’t think it’s suspicious that you’re suddenly interested in dudes _after_ inheriting my bisexual heart and dick?”

Ryan makes a face. “I don’t think that’s how attraction works.”

“Oh, so now he knows how things work,” Shane grouses to no one in particular.

“I’m going to ignore that for now,” Ryan says with an air of graciousness. “Who the fuck says it just happened? I didn’t say that, you said that, and you don’t get to decide that for me. I don’t tell you everything. I don’t say every little thing that pops into my head all the time.”

Shane opens his mouth to say something, namely that Ryan _does_ say every little thing that pops into his head all the time, but then he slams it shut again.

“What do you want, proof?” Ryan goes on. Shane’s letting Ryan get on a roll, which he knows is a mistake, but there’s also nothing he can say here that won’t make whatever is happening worse so he’s forced to watch it all unfold.  “You want me to, to sign an affidavit or something? You want me to get you off right now, Shane, and fuckin’ _prove it_? Because you can’t believe a thing unless you see it with your own two stubborn eyes.”

Wait, what?

“Ryan, you touching your own dick doesn’t prove shit. It’s basically masturbating, but with my brain in the way.”

Ryan starts shimmying out of his flannel pj bottoms. Shane’s officially alarmed. For one panicked instant he wonders what his high school self would think of this situation, if he could know what was happening in his own bedroom right now.

Thank god his parents are still downstairs.

“Oh, so you want me to get my hand on _your_ dick, Shane?” Ryan asks, belligerent now. He starts tugging off his boxer-briefs. “You want to know it’s me in here, running your controls? It wouldn’t be the first time, I’ve been all over this like flies on shit since you gave me the world’s most mind-fucking scalp massage, but whatever.”

“That’s the least sexy metaphor I’ve—”

“I’m not trying to be sexy, you stupid idiot, I’m trying to make you listen!”

Ryan’s naked now, hand around his—Shane’s— _whoever’s_ —dick. Shane can barely keep it all straight in his head now, and he doesn’t know how to feel about any of it because he doesn’t even know what it is. He can’t tell if they’re fighting or engaging in the world’s weirdest foreplay. He’s looking at himself naked, which is normal, but it’s also Ryan in there, doing this, and that’s painfully exciting and _wrong_.

“Please,” Shane chokes out, frantic. “Ryan, please stop.”

Ryan stills his hand.

“Is this not what you want? Isn’t that what you were saying, after Thanksgiving, before you disappeared on me? That you want it and you can’t have it and it’s driving you nuts? I’m _offering_ , man.”

It’s all devastating, hearing Ryan put into blunt, unflinching words what Shane’s been dancing around and trying to push down for months or—honestly, probably for longer than months. It’s the most beautiful, acute sort of horror to be offered point-blank the thing he wants so much, only to realize that it’s all wrong, that he can’t accept it.

“Of course I want it,” Shane says with a shrug, feeling as bare as Ryan. “But I want it with a you who’s all you. I want you to look like you, and sound like you, and, and _smell_ like you. And I want you to want it too, because you’re you and I’m all me, so I can be sure it’s real and not some sort of cosmic fuckery. _That’s_ what I want.”

It all spills out of him in a helpless rush, everything he’s been holding back out of fear or self-preservation. He knows it’s a tall ask of the universe, but he also knows from the dumb motivational poster hanging on his childhood bedroom wall that _You Miss 100% of the Shots You Don’t Take!_ so fuck it. It’s all ruined anyway, all his lines and rules and protective boundaries up in smoke.

Ryan reaches for his pajama pants in silence and wiggles back into them, a graceless splay of limbs.

He gets up from the bed, and Shane thinks for one miserable moment that he’s going to leave. But he doesn’t leave. He comes over to Shane’s chair, and he hauls Shane up to a standing position.

“I can’t believe how fucking short I am,” Ryan says, looking down at him. “This is so inconvenient.”

“Not that short,” Shane says, his turn to be defensive.  “Five ten, practically. That’s average.”

“Look who’s changed his tune.” Ryan bends down to capture Shane’s mouth in a kiss.

It’s another new thing Shane doesn’t know how to do in this body, another thing to re-learn. The shocking momentousness of it all has thrown him for a loop, and for too long he stands there, frozen, lips plastered awkwardly to Ryan’s.

Then Ryan laughs quietly against his mouth, Shane’s own familiar laugh muffled by lips and teeth and tongue, and the kiss moves from the idea of kiss into the real thing. It’s not a hot kiss, a going-somewhere kiss. Just a simple, perfect, for-its-own sake kiss.

Shane lets himself sink into it. He lets himself reach up to thread a hand through Ryan’s hair, even though he knows the effect it has. He opens his mouth when Ryan’s tongue licks against it and in, glorying in the slide of their mouths together. He lets himself have it.

Before it can heat up too much, as the tingles are starting to run up Shane’s spine and into his extremities, Ryan pulls up and away.

Shane half-expects something to happen. A lightning strike, a loud noise, the earth moving under their feet. Something shifting back into place that would suggest they found the fix, that the spirits are satisfied.

They stand there, staring at each other, breathing heavily. Nothing happens.

“Worth a try,” Shane says at last. Ryan shoots him a funny look.

“I didn’t do it for that. I just wanted to _._ ”

There’s nothing left to say, and nothing left to do, so they go to bed. Shane feels Ryan curl up behind him, the big spoon to his little spoon, and slip an arm around his waist. Shane’s been going to sleep alone for months, waking up alone for months, lonely for _months_. Ryan’s warmth at his back, the big hand— _Shane’s own hand_ , how fucking weird—splayed on his belly, is a gift he didn’t even know he had a right to ask for. 

“So what do you want for Christmas?” Ryan mumbles into Shane’s neck, voice foggy and close to sleep. “What do you hope’s under that ridiculously big tree for you tomorrow?”

“World peace,” Shane answers. “A hippopotamus. The crushed, mangled corpse of the spirit box, and the knowledge that it suffered in its dying moments.”

“Har har,” Ryan says. “Seriously.”

“You already know what I want.”

They fall asleep, two brains tightly coiled up in two bodies not their own. Four halves of two wholes, all mixed up together.

*

**Ryan.**

Ryan wakes up to a loud knock at the bedroom door, _shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits_.

“Wake up, you lazy assholes, it’s past ten and Mom made waffles. And whipped cream with red and green sprinkles in it because, y’know, _Mom_ ,” Scott says through the door on his way down the stairs.

Ryan groans into the pillow, not ready to be awake yet, and then he registers the warmth of Shane’s arm around him, hand snaked up under Ryan’s t-shirt to rest on his rib cage. For a minute he freezes, and then he pushes back against Shane’s body on some tired half-formed instinct and—

Wait.

Against _Shane’s_ _body_.

The body at his back is bigger than his own. The hand on his ribs, rising up and down with Ryan’s own breathing, is big and long-fingered and knobbly-knuckled and he knows it by heart now. The—and he blushes to even think it—the erection pressing into his ass is, well, _big_.

He’s surrounded by Shane, which means he cannot also be Shane.

“Shane,” Ryan says, and he squeaks in surprise when the words come out in his own real voice. In Ryan’s voice.

He brings the back of his hand up to his face and his vision’s clear again, clearer than it would be out of Shane’s eyes. The skin of his hands is darker and golden, is _right_. The fingers shorter and squarer, although the fingernails are no longer bitten down to the quick thanks to months of Shane’s care.

Shane has, after all, returned Ryan’s body in better shape than he found it, lack of visible abdominal muscles notwithstanding.

“Shane. SHANE. You’ve gotta wake up, it’s a fucking Christmas miracle.”

“Stop yelling,” Shane grumbles. “Have a little _goddamn_ respect for the birthday of our lord and sav—”

He cuts himself off. He unwinds his limbs from around Ryan, and then he sits up. Ryan looks up at him, and he looks down at Ryan.

“Holy shit. You’re. You’re you. You’re all…you’re all Ryan-y, with the face and the, the arms.”

“You’re _you_ ,” Ryan says back, breathless, so happy he could cry, so exhilarated he has to turn his face into the pillow for a moment. Looking at Shane, at Shane as he is supposed to be, is overwhelming.

Shane reaches down to him, then, and lays a spindly hand on Ryan’s collarbone, tracing it though his shirt. Shane starts to laugh, his own true laugh, and Ryan laughs too because he doesn’t have room for any feelings but relief and joy.

Shane topples back down on top of him with a sigh. He catches Ryan up in a huge bear hug, all-encompassing and strong. And then his dick brushes against Ryan’s thigh and he— _freezes_. Pulls back, like he doesn’t remember he doesn’t have to.

“It’s okay,” Ryan says. He’s feeling like it’s a lot more than okay, actually, but he’s already dealing with the surge of adrenaline and relief from their switch back and he doesn’t have space in his brain or his body for anything else. “Shane, _it’s okay_.”

“We should—”

“We’ll talk.” Ryan has no intention of talking and every intention of doing, but it will keep. “But it’ll keep until we’re home. It’s Christmas, your parents are downstairs waiting, and if we talk about that I’ll want to not talk about it. I’ll want to _not talk about it_ all morning.”

“Okay,” Shane agrees, looking stunned. He swallows hard, obviously picking up what Ryan’s laying down. He reaches over to pet Ryan’s hair in a haphazard way, like he’s making sure Ryan’s still in there.

“Well it won’t work on me now,” Ryan says with a smile so wide it almost hurts his face. “But don’t think I’ve forgotten, big guy.”

Shane lets out a garbled sort of groan and then pulls himself up, out of bed.

“Come on, there’s waffles.” As he’s throwing his pajama shirt on and doing up the buttons, he looks over at Ryan, who’s pulling on sweats. “I’m…”

“You’re?”

“I’m glad we switched back, obviously. But I’m also glad it happened after we got here, and not before. Whatever happens, I’m happy that they could meet you.”

Ryan wants to kiss him again. He wants to kiss Shane as himself, as someone who knows what he’s doing and has full control of his faculties. He knows that’s not how they get out of this room before noon, though, so he levels a hot look at Shane that he hopes conveys what he’s thinking.

It must work, because Shane trips over his own feet and falls into the door, letting out a little _oof_ when the doorknob jams into his hip.

“Having trouble controlling the legs, sir?” Ryan asks, watching with glee as indignance wars with a telltale flush on Shane’s face.

“They take some re-acclimatization. There’s a breaking-in period. Stop looking at me.”

The rest of the week passes in a blur of quiet private moments and giddy public ones. They spend all of Christmas Day practically glued at the hip, just for the pleasure of looking at each other and seeing the correct face looking back.

Shane takes Ryan to the bar to meet up with some of his high school friends, also home for the holidays. After a moment of hesitation, he introduces Ryan as “my friend Ryan,” which isn’t really necessary because they all watch the show and it’s like they know him already.

“His _ghoulfriend_ Ryan,” Ryan corrects, because he doesn’t want to be the first one to say _boyfriend_ in case he’s wrong. Shane’s arched eyebrows make for his hairline.

Later that night, four beers and two shots in, Ryan runs his hand through Shane’s hair, rubs his scalp gently with his thumb and pointer finger, and laughs to himself when Shane mutters “I’ve made a huge mistake” under his breath.

Three days later, they fly home to L.A.

*

“Oh my god, I get to go home to my own apartment and stay there,” Shane breathes out, fighting the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way out of the airport. “I get my _cat back_.  Stealing a man’s body to mack on hipster scum is one thing, but stealing his cat is really an ethically grey area.”

He glances at Ryan, who’s fiddling with the CDs Shane stores on the sun visor of the passenger side. Ryan’s usually the one driving, and he’s not sure what to do with himself riding shotgun.

“For the last time, I didn’t steal your body. Our bodies were mutually stolen from us. Two victims here,” Ryan says. “You spent two months wearing all the wrong shoes with everything and I was so kind about it. I didn’t tell you how stupid you looked once.”

Shane hums. They drive in silence for a few minutes, and then Shane asks, very nonchalant, “Am I dropping you off at your place?”

“I’ll come back to yours,” Ryan says, just as nonchalant, although his heart’s pounding. “I’ve still got some stuff over there, might as well grab it and then head home in the morning. If that’s okay.”

“It’s very okay,” Shane says fervently. They don’t say anything more, but Shane drives ten over the speed limit the rest of the way.

In all the thinking he’s done about this, and Ryan has done a lot of thinking, he’s assumed they’ll be awkward with each other. They’re both kind of awkward, fumbly people, much less suave off-camera than on, and they’re not very suave on-camera to begin with so that’s a low bar.

What Ryan’s forgotten, what he isn’t counting on, is that they already know each other’s’ bodies almost as well as they know their own.

It’s like the first time, but also not like that at all. In some ways it’s well-worn and familiar; they’ve spent the last two months doing homework for this, privately finding out what the other body likes and doesn’t like, what makes it spin into motion.

Ryan knows, when Shane curls up with a jubilant Obi, that’s it’s okay to sprawl out opposite Shane on the couch, their feet tangled together on the middle cushion, but that if he touches the bottom of Shane’s feet he’ll collapse into helpless ticklish laughter.

When Shane chases away the cat and motions to him, Ryan crawls up the length of Shane’s body and presses against him. Thanks to an obliging hipster in Silver Lake, he knows to nip gently at Shane’s neck, right at his jawline, on the way up to kiss him. To bite a tiny little mark into the skin there that makes Shane give a helpless laugh-groan right in his ear.

He knows to push his hand up into Shane’s hair, and grab a handful, and _yank_.  Shane’s hips shoot up to grind against Ryan’s thigh like they’re connected to his hair with puppetry wires.

“My life in your body got a lot more interesting after I learned this little dick hack,” Ryan says. “I held out for a long time, but after Thanksgiving—after you—Jesus.”

“Was that the first time you, uh,” Shane asks, his breath coming in quick pants.

“It felt rude.”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Me too, until after we got back from Detroit. Your body’s no joke, man. Do you just wander through life erect all the time?”

“Not all the time. You get used to it.”

“I didn’t get used to it,” Shane mutters. “Wait, excuse you, _dick hack_?”

“Check out this one weird hack to make a grown man come in his pants like a helpless teenager!” Ryan chirps, clickbait on command. Shane laughs, and then his face goes serious.

“Let me take you to bed,” Shane says, and there’s a strain to his voice like he thinks Ryan still might say no. “I want to see you in my bed.”

“I can’t believe you’re not sick of seeing me,” Ryan says, but he stands up and takes his shirt off. Sure enough, Shane takes him in hungrily, like he could never be sick of it. Shane runs his hands over Ryan’s stomach from his still-seated position on the couch, lets his fingers rest on the waistband of Ryan’s jeans. Ryan sucks in his breath and holds it.

“It’s different. You wear it differently. On me it felt like a costume.”

Shane pops the button on Ryan’s jeans and unzips the fly, but then he pulls his hand away. He looks up at Ryan, looks him over from head to toe. “Yeah, that’s a sight for sore eyes. I was pretty careful not to let myself look too much, before.”

It tugs at all the chambers of Ryan’s heart to think of Shane guarding himself that closely around him—even if it was only because it was easier that way, and not because he was afraid of what Ryan would think. But Ryan bets it was at least a little because Shane was afraid of what he would think.

“You’re an idiot,” Ryan says, even though what he means is _I’ve been an idiot_ , and he turns on his heel to head for the bedroom. “Are you coming or do I have to do this myself?”  

Shane scrambles off the couch to follow.

In the bedroom, Ryan takes off his pants and his underwear with them. There’s no point in being coy, after all; Shane’s seen it all, even if the context is different. It’s more like having sex with someone you’ve been with a long time, where the mystery of the unwrapping pales in comparison to the perfectly-calibrated touch you know awaits you if you can just get your fucking pants off.  

Shane stumbles through the doorway of his bedroom, shirt pulled half-way up and stuck on his head.

“Help me, I’m a disaster,” he moans, muffled through the shirt, and Ryan reaches out to help the shirt all the way up and over. “Oh my god, you’re so naked, when did— _Jesus Christ_.”

“Part of the reason I went to that gay bar is that I wanted to get some practice,” Ryan confesses, starting in on Shane’s jeans too. “I get that sex is sex, but what thirtysomething wants to fuck a rookie? I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

“Oh Ryan, you sweet summer child,” Shane says drily, batting Ryan’s hands away to pull his own pants off. “Just stop—why are you like this, stop moving, I want to—”

Ryan laughs and tosses himself on the bed. He strikes a pose, expecting to feel more self-conscious than he does, but the look on Shane’s face has stripped that all away. He pages through the ideas in his head, the things he might want, the things he might like.

“Let me show you,” Ryan says. “Let me show you how I did it, when I was in you.”

This, at least, he’s sure he knows how to do.

“Holy fuck, you’ve got to stop saying it like that or I’ll die,” Shane says, and before Ryan knows it Shane is _on him_ , pushing him into the mattress, pressing their hips together until Ryan wants to cry out.

Ryan’s done messing around.

“First I’d lick my hand like this, if there was no lube around,” he says, catching Shane’s eye as he licks his own hand. Shane vibrates against him.

“And then I’d reach down and touch myself, touch _you_ , slowly at first. Getting warmed up.” Ryan reaches down as he says it, and wraps his hand around Shane’s dick. It feels like he remembers, big and still growing into its full hardness, little rhythmic twitches in his hand. But the new thing, the best thing, is the way Shane heaves into his grip and plasters his mouth to Ryan’s neck.

Not entirely all old hat, then. There’s still plenty to learn about this body above him. Ryan rolls Shane over and kneels to stroke him off, getting a better angle on his hand the way he remembers liking it.

“This is about when I’d start to get loud,” Ryan says after a minute or two, “but I think I must be louder than you.”

“Whoever would have predicted,” Shane hisses.

“Let’s hear it then, big guy,” Ryan says, and he tightens his hand and speeds up his pace. If he wanted to he could draw this out, spend all night with his hand on Shane’s cock—guy’s got stamina—but he doesn’t want that right now.

Shane throws his head back, knocking it against his headboard, and a groan rips all the way from his diaphragm and out his vocal cords.

“Close,” he says, and Ryan barks a laugh because of course he knows that, knows it intimately, can almost feel his own toes curling in sympathy as he watches Shane’s body push for its release. It’s like feeling the ghost of an orgasm building in the base of his own spine just to see it happen and _remember_.

 “No shit, really?” Ryan asks, putting on a wide-eyed innocent look. “Could’ve fooled—”

“ _Ryan_ ,” Shane grits out, looking torn between laughing and punching him and coming, and then his body makes the decision for him and he comes all over Ryan’s hand. Ryan strokes him through it, resting his head on Shane’s chest to feel his gasping breaths, and then when Shane’s starting to come down he sits up again.

He waits until Shane’s focused on him again, because underneath the Lakers jerseys and the muscle tanks lies the heart of an attention-whore showboat and he’s never claimed otherwise.

“And one time I did this, because I wanted to find out if it tasted different,” Ryan says, and he brings a come-splattered finger to his mouth and sucks it clean.

“You absolute fucker,” Shane breathes, hiding his eyes in the crook of his elbow, wiping his forehead with his forearm. “When you do a thing you really do it, huh.”

Ryan shrugs and throws himself down next to Shane. He tries to mind his manners and not hump Shane’s leg. “It’s not that hard to do something you’ve sort of already done.”

Shane lies there for a long moment, getting his breath back and rubbing his face with his hand to ward off sleep. Ryan does rub a little against Shane’s side, then, a reminder rather than a rebuke.

“Trust me, I didn’t forget about you,” Shane says, licking his lips. “I’m just thinking. I’m contemplating showing you what _I_ sometimes did.”

“Why, was it freaky?” Ryan asks, curious. He hasn’t spent a whole lot of time imagining what his body was getting up to without him, but clearly that’s been an oversight on his part. He doesn’t need to know, if Shane doesn’t want to tell, but also his dick really wants to know.

Or maybe his dick knows already, and it wants _Ryan_ to know.

In response, Shane lets his hand wind down Ryan’s body, traces it down Ryan’s sternum and around his navel and across his pelvis. He curls his hand around Ryan’s erection, one pump, two pumps, and then gone again. Shane’s hand dips lower, to cup Ryan’s balls and roll them around and then to press and rub two fingers at his perineum.

“Not freaky, no. But I might have scratched the leather interior a _little_ ,” Shane says, and his fingers go lower still until Ryan gets the message.

Ryan can’t help it, he snickers.

“Oh that. Yeah, I like that.” Ryan laughs still more as Shane’s fingers withdraw and Shane splutters red-faced into his shoulder. “Sorry, am I ruining your blushing virgin fantasy? I can do some whimpering and pretend to hold out if that does it for you.”

“I don’t have a blushing…” Shane protests, shaking his surprise off. He’s already reaching into the drawer of his bedside table for the lube Ryan knows is hidden there, so he’s taking the surprise in stride.

“I was in a long-term relationship with the same woman for almost six years,” Ryan says. “You try stuff. Gotta spice it up.”

“Well Jesus, Ryan, if I’d known that I wouldn’t have felt like such a guilty asshole about it!”

“That’s my bad. I should definitely have told you in great detail about how I like it when my partner plays with my ass, which is a thing friends talk about all the time. That for sure wouldn’t have been over your bullshit _line_. I bet you would have handled that great.”

Shane glowers at him, but he’s also arranging his lanky body between Ryan’s legs, spreading him wide, slipping a pillow under his hips for access. Ryan feels very…laid out, very observed. Vulnerable, but in the way that make his dick hard even as it flushes his cheeks red hot, so he can’t be too mad about it.

For what seems like an eternity Shane looks down at him, hands on either of Ryan’s thighs, thumbs pressing down just this side of painful. Ryan bites back the urge to tell Shane to hurry the fuck up. Just because he’d wanted it fast, couldn’t make himself draw it out, doesn’t mean Shane has to be that way.

Ryan knows there’s a good chance that Shane has actively wanted this for a lot longer than he has.

Finally Shane touches him, stroking his cock feather-light, almost no grip at all. Nothing Ryan can use to get friction where he wants it. Shane strokes and strokes, giving it a little more pressure around the head of Ryan’s dick, a rub of the thumb right on the sweet spot and then away again. Still nowhere near enough.

With his other hand, he’s gotten a little lube on his finger and he’s rubbing against Ryan’s hole, investigatory rather than purposeful. Every once in a while his fingertip will catch at the rim, and Ryan will think _please_ , and then Shane will refocus his energies elsewhere.

It’s cruel, is what it is, and Ryan won’t stand for it.

“Shane, please,” he says, embarrassed when his voice cracks. “I’m not made of glass. I want it, and I am visibly aging over here.”

Shane looks up Ryan’s body at him, face red and sweaty and intent, hair a wild mess from Ryan shoving his hands through it.

“I needed to hear you say it,” he says, giving Ryan a crooked smile. “I, god, I never thought.”

He re-slicks his hand and then he’s sliding a finger into Ryan, all the way to the second knuckle in one smooth, steady motion.

“Thank fuck,” Ryan sighs.

Whatever instinct was leading Shane to go so painfully slow, making him take such meticulous care, evaporates. In no time he’s working a second finger in. His fingers are long and big, more than Ryan’s used to in the best way, more stretch and deeper. Ryan lets loose a string of curses into the air, clenches and relaxes and then clenches again around them.

“Yeah, okay,” Shane says, and his face looks overwhelmed even as he pulls his fingers back a little and crooks them carefully to find the spot inside Ryan that makes Ryan buckle in on himself and yelp. He rubs there, following Ryan up when Ryan’s body instinctively moves away from the intensity of feeling.

Ryan’s felt this before, a few times, this growing pressure behind his pelvis, the numbness in his legs, but it’s always been by happy accident rather than intentional. He wiggles his toes, hearing rather than feeling them crack.

Shane leans down to take Ryan’s dick in his mouth, sucking at the head and then sinking all the way down. Ryan’s rendered useless by this impressive display of multitasking. In some back corner of his mind he’s also feeling distinctly outclassed: shown up by Shane’s greater expertise and imagination, and that’s something he’ll have to fix in future.

Shane gags a little, on purpose because he can be a showboat too, and Ryan _does_ whimper then. It’s a ridiculous, keening noise that sounds so fake Shane pulls off with a pop to shoot Ryan a look, although his fingers don’t stop rubbing.

“I told you it wasn’t a blushing virgin thing,” he scolds. Ryan shakes his head.

“I’m not doing a _bit_ , I’m about to come all over myself.”

“Fair enough,” Shane says, and then his mouth is back where Ryan wants it. The pressure in him is almost unbearable, the fingers inside him almost too much, the throat fluttering around his dick too good. Ryan comes with his hands thrown over his face, Shane swallowing him to the hilt, and he won’t be held accountable for whatever stupid noises come out of his mouth.

Shane pulls off him, withdraws his fingers carefully. Ryan barely registers it because his ears are ringing and all the feeling is rushing back into his legs, exquisite pins and needles up and down his thighs.

“Next time we do this,” Shane says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “when we haven’t been on a plane for five hours, I want to eat you out.”

Ryan groans. He pulls the pillow out from under his head, pulls it over his face, and screams into it silently. He doesn’t understand what kind of person would say that to a man whose legs are still shaking from the _last_ obscene thing.

“Do you have, like, a bucket list or something?”

“Yes, Ryan, that’s how _I_ spent the last few weeks. While you were out getting beard burn from strangers for science, I was making lists of all the ways to demolish your body once I got it back to you.”

Ryan can’t tell if Shane is joking or not. He hopes not.

*

Thanks to the time difference it’s too early to go to sleep, so they grab showers and order Chinese food and hang out. It’s exactly like before, before all of it, except that when Ryan looks over at Shane his pulse beats faster in his wrists and his brain immediately presents him with a full-color 1080-pixel resolution image of Shane naked.

It’s also strange to look at Shane now and know exactly how he’s put together, how all the pieces combine to make him _him_ , muscle and sinew and bone and nerve. When Shane yawns and his jaw cracks, Ryan feels it. When Shane stretches his arms above his head, Ryan has x-ray vision: he can see the muscles moving under Shane’s t-shirt, skin pulling taut in the specific way he saw every morning in the mirror for over two months.

He wonders if he’ll always know these things about Shane, if Shane will always know them about him, or if the muscle memories will fade in time.

“Are you sorry we went back to New Orleans?” Ryan asks.

Shane tips his head back and feeds lo mein into his mouth from above. He chews, thinking.

“Yes and no. Yes, in that the last two months have been torture. Yes, in that I know now that even if ghosts aren’t real, some sort of supernatural voodoo-adjacent thing is, and that pisses me off. You know how much I hate it when you’re right.”

Ryan waits him out, cramming most of an egg roll in his mouth just to have something to do.

“But also no,” Shane continues, “in that I’m pretty sure we were well into the process of fucking everything up for no reason except that we didn’t know how to make words of substance come out of our mouths at each other. Plus an hour ago I had my fingers inside you and obviously that’s preferable to…not doing that.”

Ryan coughs, and little bits of egg roll spray everywhere. Shane tactfully pretends not to notice.

“Obviously,” he agrees.

Shane turns on the tv and starts flicking through Netflix for something unobtrusive to watch, and Ryan starts wondering how long he has to wait before he can ask if they can have sex again, using his time in Shane’s body as a gauge.

Obi hops up on Shane’s lap again, thrilled to finally have his proper human back.

“So…ghoulfriend, huh?” Shane asks. “Like, what is that?”

“Oh you wanna be that guy?” Ryan asks. “Had your body back for less than a week and you want to slap a label on this? Clingy much?”

Shane throws a chopstick at him.

“I said it because I figured we should talk about it before I introduced myself to a bunch of your friends as your boyfriend, is all. Also boyfriend seems…insufficient for whatever this is, but it’s too new for anything else.”

“Well, they don’t really have a word for when you’re friends with someone for four years, and ghost-hunting partners with them for two, and then you switch bodies for two months, and then you buy two first-class one-way tickets to bonetown,” Shane says. “Everything’s insufficient.”

“Sure they do,” Ryan says. “The word is ‘ghoulfriend.’ When I look at your sloth face and I think about wanting to make out with it, I think: ghoulfriend _._ ”

In Ryan’s mind, it’s the only word that encompasses the entire gamut of his and Shane’s weird, constantly-evolving relationship. It’s not a thing you can really tell other people and have them take you seriously, so maybe they’ll stick with boyfriends in public, or partners when they earn it. But to Ryan, in his head and in his heart, it’ll always be ghoulfriend.

“Ghoulfriends it is,” Shane agrees. He tips his head back onto the back of the couch, and then he pats the cushion beside him to indicate that Ryan should join him.

Ryan leans against Shane, pressed flush until there’s no light between them, wound together so that from a distance they could be one many-limbed thing. It still feels a bit like leaning against himself, like touching himself.

They’ll have to learn to untangle themselves again, to exist as Ryan and Shane and not _ryanandshane,_ if they want a shot at normal again. But maybe not tonight _._

**Author's Note:**

> …So does anybody call Trope Bingo yet?


End file.
